KARACHI: Councillors want govt facilities to be public friendly
KARACHI, March 16: Concrete and meaningful changes were recommenced at a workshop here on Saturday to make public friendly government facilities in health, education and legal sectors.
The workshop was organized by the information technology department of the Karachi City District Government.
The workshop, held in collaboration with the CIET-International following a baseline study on community monitoring of public services and human rights in 10 districts of the city, was largely attended by women councillors, Nazims, representatives of NGOs and senior officials of the city government.
The participants, expressing concern regarding the negative public perception as well as negative experience with regard to government healthcare, educational facilities, police and courts, stressed the need for urgent measures to improve these with provisions for constant monitoring and transparency.
The information collected during the study revealed that on an average 36 per cent of people preferred to avail of government health facilities, 65pc wanted to send their children to government schools, 26pc were desirous to seek police help for personal/property safety and 23pc found courts to be of no help.
Dr Anne Cockcroft, the Project Manager of the CIET for Pakistan, in her presentation referring to the data collected during the study reflecting rampant public distrust towards police, courts, healthcare and educational facilities, said the evidence would be soon fed into resource-training packages to be tested at the community level.
With reference to the study, she mentioned that it was in accordance with the Local Government Plan which provided for community monitoring mechanism. she said the exercise was also an effort to a prototype community monitoring scheme while providing baseline data in 10 districts of the country.
The objectives in the first phase was obtaining the knowledge and level of participation in the devolution process and access to above-mentioned public services besides identifying modes and mechanisms to promote the development of effective Citizen Community Boards (CCBs) which would be used to develop training packages.
With reference to citizens’ participation and perceptions, knowledge and views about the CCBs, the CIET representative reminded that comparatively few had any proper idea about the CCBs and 33pc respondents expressed their interest to participate in the CCB. But she clarified that the response had been gathered before the union council elections in the country.
S. P. Kamran Fazal, representing the Karachi City District Police, Shaikh Shamim and Ali Nawaz Shaikh from the education and health departments, respectively, came forward with recommendations to improve the situation and to restore public confidence in the above-mentioned things.
Tariq Hasan, the Naib Nazim of the city government, presided over the session and assured of his all support and efforts to improve working as well as accessibility of the people to facilities operating in the city.
Dr Yahya Waliullah, the executive district officer of the information technology department of the city government, and other heads from the health, education and home departments also attended the workshop and took part in the discussion. — APP
