Smartphone use proposed to address public grievances
KARACHI: The Sindh government is considering a proposal to use smartphones for redress of public grievances against police and other departments, it emerged on Sunday.
Officials considered a proposal titled ‘Citizen feedback and community outreach through mobile phones’, envisaging interaction between the people and the government which, if implemented, could prove a ‘cheaper and cost-effective way’ of addressing the people’s problems besides bringing ‘political dividends’ for the government, according to sources and documents reviewed by Dawn.
The sources said that the proposal came under deliberations at a recent meeting presided over by outgoing Sindh chief secretary Mohammed Ejaz Chaudhry at the Sindh secretariat with representatives of the World Bank, provincial departments and police officials.
The meeting was informed that the Punjab government in collaboration with the Lahore University of Management Sciences was working on a project of plotting crime incidents on Google Maps with date, nature of crime and time.
Under the project, Lahore and Gujranwala have been selected as a pilot project where the police response would be planned to control crime in both cities.
It was proposed at the meeting that Sindh could adopt the same to control crime in its major cities such as Karachi.
The meeting decided that all secretaries and the inspector general of police, Sindh, should nominate an officer(s), who would play a key role in adopting these practices in their respective departments. These to-be-selected officers will be sent on orientation and training relating to the use of smartphone. According to the minutes of the meeting, it was also decided that the
IG would be asked “to create a linkage between 15-Madadgar and smartphone crime monitoring to control crimes, especially in Karachi”.
The chief secretary said success of the adoption of those ideas depended on individual ownership of the respective head of the department and secretaries, who should work for the adoption of those tools to help achieve an improved delivery of public services.
The deliberations were followed by a presentation on governance reforms by a World Bank consultant, Zubair Bhatti. He told the meeting that the purpose of the proposal was to reach out to the community through text messaging to collect feedback on their experience of interaction with the government offices as well as quality of services in different offices such as police, hospitals, education and revenue. He said under the proposal, the data would be collected from field offices, containing the name of the visitor with his phone number. Subsequently, a random ‘robocall’ would be made in the voice of the Sindh chief minister, asking the person to give their feedback text message on a particular number.
The meeting was informed that after receiving the feedback, the data would be compiled by a third party that would rank the experiences of different individuals through software. The data would then be analysed at various levels for a required action.
“The software can easily indicate a particular office having a consistent large number of complaints of corruption or misbehaviour, which requires action,” the documents stated.
“It is a management tool whereby senior officers can have feedback as well as effective control over their field officers, it pays back in the form of a political dividend, due to the goodwill generated through SMS and robocalls,” said the World Bank consultant.
The participants in the meeting also deliberated on another proposal of monitoring tool of having a real-time activity report as well as physical presence of the staff in schools, hospitals and outreach departments.
It was pointed out that through a smart Android phone, “we can easily see the location of the user and he can send and upload live photo of his field activities”.
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