LAHORE, Oct 23: The Punjab government will decide if the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) be engaged to carry out a computerised census of its employees in other districts of the province after analysing the findings of a Faisalabad pilot project.

Punjab Additional Chief Secretary Najibullah Malik told Dawn on Tuesday he had received the report carried out by Nadra and would decide whether or not retain the authority for other districts after going through it. He said it was a good initiative and would help detect ghost employees and double payments.

The civil service census pilot project for Faisalabad was signed between the Punjab governor and Nadra in Feb this year and was subsequently launched in May and completed in Sept.

Primarily, the scope of the project was the establishment and commissioning of temporary and permanent registration sites in Faisalabad district for the registration and issuance of employees’ identity cards to the Punjab government employees and provision of employee data to Project for Improvement in Financial Reporting and Auditing (Pifra) for integration in the existing system.

According to a senior officer, the project was conceived to acquire a data on 20,000 employees in Faisalabad district but 46,590 employees had been registered.

The authority loaded the enrolled data into Pifra’s central server and applied business rules duly approved by the provincial government for the validation of electronic record and also checked the duplication on the basis of CNIC. Nadra processed only those applications that had original CNICs and ran required internal systematic validation and data sanity checks, ensuring mandatory fields.

He said the authority had equipped the offices of the District Accounts Department, district coordination officer and executive district officers with computers, which would be connected to its headquarters and the Punjab Civil Secretariat through latest networking technologies.

It is an Asian Development Bank-funded project, which is aimed at checking payroll, leave record, retirement, promotion and placement programmes.

Nadra will carry out the project in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Lodhran, Multan, Khanewal, Kasur, Bahawalpur and Gujranwala, in the second phase provided it is given a go ahead from the provincial government.

The computerised census of pensioners by Nadra is also subject to the approval of the authorities concerned.