COMMUNICATION-PAKISTAN: Scepticism Greets E-Government Plan

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Muddassir Rizvi

ISLAMABAD, Aug 7 2001 (IPS) - Pakistan’s military rulers are turning to information technology to improve governance and public services, but the scheme, which has a budget of 35 million U.S. dollars, is facing a surfeit of critics.

While the government says the plan would bring public services to people’s doorstep and will be a step towards good governance, critics do not see much hope of its success in improving either governance or government transparency.

For instance, Isa Daudpota, who headed the first United Development Programme (UNDP)-sponsored email service to public in Pakistan almost a decade ago, says: “With the government departments even lacking basic connectivity at present, it would be interesting to see how they plan to move forward.”

“The problem with the poor governance has little to do with lack of computers,” adds Daudpota, although he clarifies that he is not discounting the importance of information technology.

Under the e-government plan, the government says it will develop websites for 34 federal ministries and Pakistani missions abroad. The plan also envisages electronic notification of all official gazettes and availability of country’s statutes and case laws online.

“This plan will enable people to file their tax returns and also to pay their utility bills, income tax, sales tax and other federal, provincial and local taxes, electronically,” says Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman, federal minister for science and technology.

“The E-government plan will increase the level of transparency in all government transactions and also improve coordination among government departments and ministries, their efficiency and productivity,” says Rahman, who has been instrumental in IT being in the government’s list of priorities.

“This will ultimately benefit the people as it would ensure electronic service delivery to the people,” he says.

While good governance was among the seven-point agenda announced by General Pervez Musharraf when he took over power in 1999, the international financial institutions like the World Bank have been pressing the country to overhaul its administrative machinery and make it more pro-people.

A Bank mission visiting the country earlier this year had linked its 45 million-dollar technical assistance with good governance, advising Islamabad to urgently change its development and governance strategy.

Subsequently, the Ministry of Finance worked out details to design new policies focusing on macro economic and structural reforms, poverty reduction and monitoring, debt management and reorientation of the role of the government.

“The IT development and E-government are part of the larger plan to improve governance that includes civil service, tax reforms and public enterprises and privatization reforms, private sector development including provision of essential public services,” says a finance ministry official.

Observers though note that perhaps the government ought to improve the more basic telecommunication services first before launching the ambitious scheme that is expected to be completed within two to three years.

Considering how crucial phones are to the plan, this country of more than 135 million people has less than three million working telephone connections, while the installed capacity remains at just 3.6 million.

As it is, less than 10 percent of the Pakistani population were using the Internet as of last year.

Proponents of the scheme, however, have been quick to point out that Internet usage in the country has been growing at more than 50 percent per annum and has progressed from 0.011 million users in 1998 to 1.3 million in 2000.

Still, the few ordinary citizens who have heard of the plan remain pessimistic. Bilquees Fatima, standing in a utility bills queue outside a bank in Islamabad, comments: “They couldn’t even streamline the payment of utility bills in decades…how do they expect to make it any better now?”

“E-government or not, I’ll have to stand in this long queue for hours to deposit my bills,” she harrumphs, pointing out: “I neither have a computer, nor do I know how to use it.”

Other critics say that e-government is too narrow an approach to improve governance.

Says Zubair Faisal Abbasi of e-poor, an organization working to improve the digital divide in Pakistan: “If you look at the government in developing countries, you will find the allegation of being ineffective, not cost-effective, obscurantist and not accountable.”

“These issues,” he argues, “qualify to e-governance and not the narrow approach embodied in e-government plan, which is more like automation.”

Abbasi says: “If properly directed and used keeping in view the good governance paradigm of bringing information from public domain to wider and interactive public domain, I think infocom has very critical and significant role to play.

But Abbasi believes that that the government will have to look at things with a boarder scope if it is serious in harnessing the real potentials of information technology.

“It needs to address on the ground situation in the legal, financial, accessibility, interactivity and disclosure frameworks,” he says, noting the absence of laws even to guarantee access to information.

The obscurity of government transactions and actions has a direct link with at least 16 laws that restrict people’s access to information. Unless these laws are repealed, argued the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists in a press release, the government cannot ensure transparency in its working.

Journalist Zafarullah Khan remarked in a recent article: “The governance pattern of the country has been devised to retain the colonial mindset of keeping the people in the dark by denying them their democratic right to information about the affairs which shape their lives and destiny.”

Many observers in fact say the only real beneficiaries of the plan would be the local computer and software companies that have mushroomed as a result of lucrative government incentives over the last two years.