KARACHI, Dec 5: Despite having limited manpower and resources, the Information Technology Department of City Government has finalized plans to link up 18 towns and all 14 departments of the City Government, including the Nazim, Naib Nazim and DCO secretariat.

The IT department in its last presentation to the City nazim gave various proposals to link up all towns and departments of Karachi and launch all application forms of different public services, including birth/death registrations etc in a uniform pattern at the City Government’s web-site.

A single pattern for every form will be approved for all departments and towns whether they are related with general public or inter-departmental working and a separate number will be allotted for different union councils for identification.

EDO IT Mohammad Yahya informed after this plan is materialised, the City Government would be linked up with NADRA and other departments so that the people face no problems in getting their ID cards and other necessary requirements.

Though the City Government’s website is expected to be launched early next month, the inter-town networking and floating of uniform forms might take some time for materialisation.

However, to accomplish it at least one programmer is needed at each town who will not only facilitate the IT department but will also support the Town Nazim as well.

The department plans to expand these services to all union councils of Karachi, initially working by storing datas in floppy discs and transferring them to the City Government, while a networking will be done at a later stage.

The process of networking in towns would be launched from any one of the four towns of the former DMC East.

EDO Information Technology Mohammad Yahya said the main reason for this is that former DMC East has the best available technical experts among all the 18 towns of Karachi.

Whereas, Gadap, Malir, Landhi, Baldia, Orangi, SITE and Korangi towns do not have any computer experts to operate networking and programming.

Staff for such towns will be trained by the IT department who has already made arrangements to train staff from surplus pool.

Nevertheless the main problem faced by the department is non-availability technical experts in the City Government as the City Government will include all the computer departments of local bodies which include KMC, KDA and KW&SB. The computer department of the KMC has 34 officers and staff. The total strength of computer department in the KWSB is 24, while there are only 10 in KDA, making a total of 68 technical personnel.

The strength is more than 90 and ironically the number of programmers, system administrators, hardware engineer and web-designers is limited to less than a total of six.—PPI