KARACHI, May 7: The Sindh government is striving to promote information technology in urban and rural areas on equal footing to establish an effective IT infrastructure.
This was stated by Sindh chief secretary KB Rind while exchanging views with federal secretary IT Ashfaq Mehmood who visited him at the Sindh Secretariat. The IT department’s secretary, Yahya Waliullah, was also present on the occasion.
The chief secretary said that the newly created IT department had formulated a comprehensive strategy to train 15,000 government functionaries from grade 5 to 20 throughout Sindh in every district. He added that IT literacy would be made mandatory for all future government employments.
The federal secretary assured the Sindh government of full cooperation for developing human resource for the purpose.
Earlier, Mr Rind presided over a meeting of district officers held to review IT activities in the province. He highlighted the goals and said the computer literacy was aimed at introducing E-government system in the province.
He advised the IT department to arrange orientation trainings for senior officers and ensure proper know-how of IT amongst officials, so that the province could achieve IT goals in generating sufficient job opportunities.
He asked the officials to take full advantage of IT and come up with good programmes so that the digital divide among various districts could be bridged.
The chief secretary was informed by IT secretary Yahya Waliullah that recently 16 posts of EDO were created in the IT department, but for want of qualified officers, the charge of EDO of IT had been given to officers of revenue, finance and technical education in a number of districts; however, the post was still vacant in some of the districts including Karachi, Jacobabad, Mithi and Mirpurkhas, which was causing obstacles in implementation of projects.
The meeting was informed that the department, which would provide training to 15000 government employees in Sindh, would have to train a minimum 700 employees in every district; and in addition to that 2000 students and jobless graduates would be trained. The IT secretary said the federal government had established one IT virtual university campus at Sukkur, three more VU campuses would be established at Jacobabad, Ghotki and Badin and an IT university was being established in Karachi.
The meeting decided that those who passed the tests after training would be paid incentive bonus; and computer-training certificates would be considered an additional qualification at the time of writing ACR and during promotions.
It was also decided that government officials having responsibilities in important offices would be provided training on priority basis and one-day computer training programmes would be arranged for district Nazims, Naib Nazims, DCOs and EDOs of all the districts to familiarise them with the computer.
The IT department was asked to expedite the launching process of the Sindh government Internet to minimise paper correspondence among the departments and district offices.
