PESHAWAR: Chief Minister Mahmood Khan approved a one-year action plan of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Technology Board (KPITB) here on Wednesday.

The action plan includes several digital governance initiatives that will be launched over the next one year.

According to a statement, Mr Khan approved the plan while chairing a meeting of KPITB. It said that under the plan various public services being provided by different government departments, including domicile certificate, birth certificate, driving licence and motor car registration, would be digitalised.

After completion of back-end digitalisation these services will be provided to the citizens under same roof through the Citizens Facilitation Centres established under the KP-BOIT so that people would not need to visit various offices to avail of the services.

Similarly, under the paperless government initiative, work will be started on introducing e-office system in government departments. Initially, e-office system will be introduced in the CM Secretariat.

To begin with the e-office initiative, online system of summaries will be introduced in all the departments, followed by online system of rest of the file works.

One-year plan includes issuance of domicile, birth certificate, driving licence, car registration

Moreover, the mobile applications of all the departments will be centralised into a super-app and a centralised online system of data of all the government departments will also be introduced to ensure easy access of public to government departments’ data.

The chief minister directed the authorities to give realistic timelines for implementation of the initiatives and ensure physical progress on the same.

He said that increasing efficiency and ensuring transparency in government departments through maximum use of information technology was one of the key priority areas of his government. He directed the KPITB authorities to take result-oriented steps to this end in collaboration with the government departments.

He also directed the concerned authorities to come up with feasible proposals to introduce a centralised online system for mutation of lands and to impart training to the concerned staff of Board of Revenue with the aim to ensuring transparency in this regard.

Agreeing to the proposal of having a cyber response centre to ensure safety of government departments’ online data, he directed the officials to initiate work on it.

Mr Khan also launched mobile water quality testing labs for divisional headquarters of the province. He said this initiative was a milestone of the government towards provision of quality services to people in the social services sector.

The chief minister said that such mobile labs would play vital role in ensuring provision of drinking water to the people of far-flung areas of the province.

Mr Khan was informed that these labs had been launched at eight divisional headquarters of the province. The authorities said that these mobile labs would be sent to the far-flung areas of the province for testing water quality in order to ensure that hygienic drinking water was available to the people of remote areas.

Published in Dawn, November 26th, 2020