October 15, 2006	Sunday	Ramazan 21, 1427

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LAHORE, Oct 14: The first ever computerised census of the Punjab government employees is being carried out to eliminate ghost employment, it is learnt.

Official sources told Dawn on Saturday that the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) had been assigned the task. Initially, they said, the Punjab government had engaged Nadra to launch a pilot project in this regard in Faisalabad district.

They said the authority had been given three months to complete the computerised census of about 40,000 Punjab government employees in Faisalabad.

After completing the pilot project, they said that Nadra would carry out the computerised census in other districts of the province, while it would launch the same in Balochistan shortly.

“The computerised census will also facilitate the government in rightsizing, streamlining human resource management, and annual budgeting,” they added.

They said the authority would manage the pilot project for two years and then hand it over to the government after imparting training to its relevant staff.

They said the Punjab government had secured foreign funding for the pilot project, however, it was looking for donors to finance the exercise in the remaining districts.

They said the department concerned and district representatives would provide the required information and other related material to the authority in this respect.

A Nadra official told this reporter that the project would help improve financial reporting and auditing (PIFRA) and (SAP-R\3), software, and human resource management (HRM) modules.

“The authority is preparing lookup libraries of organisational units employee specifications (grades, designation, groups and scales), human resource specifications (leave types, transfers, promotions). Once finalised, the list will be transformed into electronic form after due validation from the government authorities,” he said.

He said Faisalabad district government had prepared a schedule for the number of employees/officials visiting a particular swift centre of Nadra for enrollment.

The authority would feed the enrolled data into PIFRA central server. The PIFRA would apply business rules duly approved by the provincial government for the validation of electronic record that would check duplication on the basis of CNIC.

He said Nadra would process the applications with original CNICs, and run required internal systematic validation and data sanity checks ensuring mandatory fields. After validation, the batch would be sent for printing facility at the Nadra headquarters.

Modification and reporting on the data will be handled through PIFRA and SAP. It included personal (name, address) and employment data (appointment, posting, promotion).