Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB)

Public offices are a little too hesitant to play with technology. But credit must be give where it is
due. Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) has rolled out some pioneering technology
solutions to automate governments business process and bring down some barriers in service
delivery to the citizens of Punjab.
In facilitating the citizens, PITB has Citizen Contact Centre, and Citizen Feedback Model that
provide multilingual centralised call centre platform with 12 different government helplines, and
a service that proactively solicits citizens feedback about their interaction with the government,
respectively. As per PITBs statistics, 4.4 million citizens have been contacted via automated calls
and SMSs, 45000 has been the daily interactions, and 4000 corrective actions have been taken.
On the health side, PITB has developed a smartphone application called HealthWatch for the
district health supervisory officers who are appointed to visit health facilities in their districts.
This app helps the government monitor indicators like staff absenteeism, out of stock medicines,
etc. where the data is collected in real time. Launched in February 2014, indicators recorded so
far on this application are more than 7000.
Another one of PITBs projects in the heath sector is the Disease Surveillance System (DSS) - a
centralised system developed to monitor, control and help eradicate contagious and epidemicprone
26 diseases identified by WHO. For anti-Dengue measures, a Dengue Activity Tracking
System (DATS) has also been initiated throughout Punjab.
From the security perspective, PITB carries out crime reporting under its Crime Investigation
Reporting System (CIRS) using a purpose build Android application with Urdu interface. So far
crime mapping is restricted to Lahore where the police personnel record the location, time and
nature of the crime being reported, and the data is then mapped in both spatial and temporal
dimensions to identify crime pockets as well as chart trends for corrective measures.
There are two highlighting features in most of these projects and many others initiated by PITB:
(a) most of these make use of smartphones and smartphone applications, (b) all of these projects
are being implemented for the first time in Pakistan. And while there may still be many
discrepancies in addressing governance issues through these initiatives, steps must be taken to
replicate such technology solutions at all provincial and the national levels to address some
pressing issues at hand.