May 6, 2005	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 26, 1426

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ISLAMABAD, May 5: Pakistan has called for greater cooperation and partnerships with South Korea in the IT sector to use information communication technologies as a tool for quick and reliable delivery of public services. “Pakistan is keen to benefit from the experience and expertise Korea possesses in e-governance and e-commerce to introduce a paperless environment with special focus on e- procurement in the public sector organizations,” said IT ministry secretary Khalid Saeed in his keynote speech at a seminar here on Thursday.

The seminar on “e-procurement” had been jointly organized by Electronic Government Directorate of the Ministry of Information Technology and Korean IT Promotion Agency.

The seminar was part of a series of consultative activities designed to help officials from the Korean IT Promotion Agency to prepare a roadmap for introducing e-procurement system in public sector organizations in Pakistan.

A seven-member team of Korean IT officials is currently visiting Pakistan as the follow-up of a Memorandum of Understanding signed between the Electronic Government Directorate of Pakistan and the Korean IT Promotion Agency for promotion of cooperation in the IT sector.

Following the MoU signed in January this year, the Korean government has sent a delegation to Islamabad to prepare a procurement model for Pakistan on the lines of “Public Procurement Service” of Korea that has been declared the world’s best e-procurement practice by the United Nations.

Mr Saeed highlighted the government’s efforts in introducing e-governance in all the ministries by linking them up through a federal data centre within a year to help the government move towards a paperless economy.

Korean Public Procurement Service Director Jae Yong Lee gave an overview of the e-procurement system introduced in Korea. He said the system put in place in 2000 had worked wonders, helping save nearly $3 billion every year in terms of time and transportation in the overall business volume that stood at $64 billion last year.

He said he believed that Pakistan would benefit tremendously from such a system which had the capacity to raise productivity by saving costs in transactions and also improving transparency which was a big issue for the bidders.

Later, talking to journalists, Electronic Government Directorate Director-General Seerat Asghar said his team was working aggressively with the Korean officials to prepare a workable e-procurement model.