KARACHI, Oct 7: Better planning and an effective strategy to provide improved services to the people of Karachi and transforming the city into a beautiful modern city came under discussion at a meeting held here on Sunday under the chairmanship of City Nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal.

Managing Director of the Water Board Ghulam Arif, Chief Controller of Buildings of the Karachi Building Control Authority Rauf Akhtar Farooqi and EDOs were among the officials who attended the meeting.

They put forward various suggestions to improve performance of their departments, besides considering the proposals aimed at making more active through a better planning.

Mr Kamal told the meeting all the departmental heads were supposed to run their respective organization with due zeal in order to make it strong and moving. He said the EDOs should groom a second leadership in their respective department to achieve the desired results and avoid the department’s working dependent on the EDO alone.

“No mega city in the world is faced with major problems merely because of the pressure of its population. Nor does a big city is faced with resource constraints,” he remarked. He observed that Karachi, being the country’s biggest city having a population of 17 million souls, played a vital role in the country’s economic growth. “The CDGK, governing such a big city, should not need any financial help,” he maintained, and said that in fact its departments had not yet started functioning with planning.

The city nazim pointed out that much more development work had been carried out over the past two years than it had been done over the previous 58 years. He acknowledged that the CDGK officials played an important role in carrying out the development work. He, however, said that all these works were being carried out on war-footings but a good organisation must prefer undertaking such works with proper planning.

He told all CDGK departments to do planning for 2, 4 and 10 years and then start work on various projects in accordance with the plans. He said EDOs should brief him about the plans so that the city could progress in every field and its citizens could have due facilities.

Mr Kamal also directed all EDOs to activate their sub-ordinates. “Those who demonstrate good performance should be rewarded and those who appear inefficient and lethargic should be punished,” he stressed, adding that inefficient and negligent officials should be removed from their service.

He told the EDOs that steps would have to be taken to run the CDGK in a professional manner and serve all citizens in a better way. He asked them to prepare a list of inefficient, irresponsible and negligent employees so that efficient, responsible and punctual workers could be appointed to handle their jobs.—APP