LAHORE: The Government College University (GCU) claimed on Friday full implementation of the e-Filing and Office Automation System (e-FOAS), transitioning the varsity’s working to a completely paperless administrative environment.
The Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) developed e-FOAS, a cloud-based digital platform, and provided it to the university free of cost on the instructions of Punjab government.
Under the new digital framework, all administrative and academic workflows across the GCU’s departments have gone fully online.
The e-FOAS portal centralises routine administrative functions of the varsity, ranging from faculty leave applications, travel NOCs, and Annual Performance Evaluation Reports (PERs) to official orders and executive circulars.
A GCU spokesman says that all the critical internal operations, such as digital note sheets (e-Noting) for inter-departmental proposals, visiting faculty honorarium approvals, procurement requisitions and departmental meeting agendas will be logged and processed exclusively through the cloud platform, eliminating manual file system entirely.
Speaking about the transition, Vice Chancellor Prof Omer Chaudhry emphasised that digital governance is essential for modern academic management. “Going completely paperless is not just an environmental initiative, but a structural shift toward transparency, speed, and accountability,” he stated.
“By removing bureaucratic delays and manual file tracking, our faculty and administrative heads can focus their energies on core academic and research pursuits, establishing a modern digital benchmark for state universities across the province.”
The spokesman says the shift to e-FOAS marks the culmination of a broader digitisation campaign initiated during the last academic year.
He says the GCU administration had previously laid the groundwork for a paper-free campus by introducing digital portals for online approval of student societies’ events and automated billing systems for the visiting faculty payments.
Continuing its technological overhaul, GCU is also set to launch a comprehensive e-Services Portal. This upcoming platform is designed to handle maintenance requests and other campus services efficiently, ensuring infrastructure issues are resolved quickly without disrupting academic activities.
In addition to the current campus operations, the university’s IT modernisation extends to its graduates, with a major project currently underway to fully digitise all alumni data.
Published in Dawn, August 8th, 2026
