ISLAMABAD, Feb 6: Minister for Information Technology Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari on Friday offered his ministry's resources to fund e-government initiatives and help National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) improve accountability and efficiency of the local government system.

"We are ready to make available IT as a vehicle to ensure transparency and accountability in the local government system with particular focus on the citizen's community boards (CCBs)," the minister said in a presentation.

The presentation was given by NRB chairman Daniyal Aziz on e-government projects prepared to facilitate the working of citizens community boards (CCBs) besides ensuring transparency and efficiency in the utilization of funds.

Awais Leghari directed officials in his ministry, including the Electronic Government Directorate (EGD), to team up with the NRB and take up similar projects on regular basis. He was of the view that people, particularly elected representatives, having access to vital government information could easily play an effective role in ensuring accountability at all levels in the government.

Earlier, Daniyal Aziz briefed Awais Leghari about the role and functioning of the CCBs set up across the country for energizing the community for development and improvement in service delivery, identification of development and municipal needs, mobilization of stakeholders for community involvement in the improvement and maintenance of facilities and other public- welfare oriented works in the area.

He called sharing of information a vital requirement of the devolution philosophy and lamented that even different government organizations and departments were not interlinked with each other to share relevant information.

"The objective of having information technology as part of the local government bodies is to make information easily accessible by streamlining the information through automation," he added.

The minister observed that Pakistan for most part inherited its government systems from the British era where information was recorded on ledgers. As such the retrieval of such information as and when required was a mammoth task not only for policymakers, but also for the public who were the primary stakeholders.

He believed projects prepared by the NRB with a view to using IT as an enabler would provide the people power to visualize, explore, query and analyze data geographically or in text-based report format.

He said the project could easily be replicated in all districts of the country at a cost of Rs400 million, but the benefits it would entail in terms of transparency and efficiency alongside job opportunities and creation of work for the local IT industry in the government departments would save the government much more in return.

"Following the implementation of the system, the people would be able to access all vital information, even about necessary public record and details of government employees working in different departments of the districts," he said.