Pakistan Heads Towards M-Governance

Police constable Muhammad Imran heads to a crime scene.... a car has been stolen there.

He takes a photo and uploads the details into his smart phone. The application then creates a tag on a GPS map of the city. 

Superintendent Mustafa Hammed Malik is the head of this pilot project.

He says with the help of the map, police can make better strategies to combat crimes.

“GPS mapping has shown very interesting clusters on the Google map about the exact location and time of crimes. So with the help of this mapping even the limited resources can be utilized in a better way that helps control the crimes to a great extent.”

Pakistan has 30 million internet users with around half accessing via their mobile phones.

The government’s Information Technology Board believes smart phone can revolutionize how services are delivered. 

Chairman Umer Saif says it’s time to a “mobile government”.

“So we’ve started to use a smart phone as a platform of choice for automating government functions. We will be giving out smart phones, by times many government officials already have smart phones. But, we are happy to procure more smart phones and write applications for them.”

Another success app is “Clean Lahore”…it has helped stop the spread of the dengue virus. 

Public health workers take photos after they have cleaned an area of stagnant water where mosquitoes breed….

Abid Raza Syed is the executive engineer at the Water and Sanitation authority.

“Pictures are uploaded to inform the higher authorities that the task has been performed with pictorial evidence, time, date and location. Even, the chief minister of the province can monitor through geo-tagging on the Google map..”

It also show information about where mosquito eggs are and hospital reports of dengue outbreaks…

This helps the government to predict where dengue outbreaks might start.

Umer Saif says they’re going to expand the mobile projects.

“In education we’re going to make a fairly large intervention smart phone driven where monitoring officers, who visit the school facilities, are going to carry the smart phones. We’re going to use the smart phones to monitor the teachers’ absenteeism.”

He says the World Bank is very impressed with what has been accomplished in Punjab.

Umer Saif  hopes that Pakistan will become a model of mobile-governance.