For the people?

SOMETIME ago, I had to apply for a visit visa to a country that required a ‘police certificate’ as well. This was the first time I had heard of the police certificate. I asked around and was told that the police in Lahore had Khidmat Centres and I could go to anyone of them and apply for a certificate. I did exactly that.
On the day I did not have to teach in the afternoon, I reached a Khidmat Centre at about 2pm. There was a long queue of some 45 men waiting to submit their applications. It was hot and all had to queue under the sun. I stood for a couple of hours and then came back. In the two hours that I had been there, the line outside had barely moved. I realised there was no way I would be able to submit my application before closing time.
Next day, I reached the Khidmat Centre about 30 minutes before opening time in the morning. There were still some 30 people in the line before me. I waited for about three hours and then had to leave as I had a class to teach. In those three hours, the documents of only seven to eight people in the men’s line appeared to have been processed. I am not sure how many got through among the women.
On both days, the men had to queue in the sun with no shade overhead. It was the height of summer and there was no water cooler installed nearby that could allow them to have a drink. The Khidmat Centre is supposed to help people. Why do we make it so hard for people to access khidmat?
Eventually, I got the report and a police officer to whom I wrote about this was very kind and not only had a shade and a water cooler installed at the centre, but also had the police double the number of desks checking applications so that the processing time could be shortened. But this is one centre and one service, while citizens need to go for hundreds of such services everywhere.
A friend told me that he had to submit some documents in a Gulf country where he was asked to have them verified by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the country’s embassy in Pakistan and then the Pakistani embassy in that country. This means a lot of time and effort in offices that are not really designed for dealing with and facilitating people. But it had to be done, and time and effort were expended on it.
Look at the issue of degree verification in Pakistan. My university gives me a degree after years of work. If I apply to the public sector or abroad I have to get my degree ‘verified’ from the Higher Education Commission (HEC), and in the case of applications abroad, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well. Most of these processes are neither online nor very quick.
One understands that we have arrived at a point where most of those inside Pakistan and especially those outside the country do not trust the documents we submit. They feel they need layers of verifications and attestations before they accept the documents, and us, as trustworthy. We have not reached this stage in a day and will not get out of it in a day either. But we can at the very least work towards making the process of obtaining attestations and verifications smoother. Unfortunately, we are not doing that either.
Why does HEC need to verify degrees in this day and age? All universities in Pakistan are now sufficiently online. Why can they not submit the list of the students and their degrees to HEC at the time of graduation and then give or send the verified/ attested degrees to the student. If need be, they can charge the students for the service.
This will save the hassle of verification going forward. It will also save students the time they spend on going to HEC and getting the verification done. Since it would be a university-to-HEC transaction, the HEC and universities can work out the details to make the process as smooth as possible.
This could be done for some years once the system is set up. The universities have records of their graduates. And this is how they verify degrees when HEC asks about a particular candidate. The record of the last few years must be digital. The universities could send the names and degrees of the graduates from the last few years — either in batches or in some other way permitted by the system — and HEC could attest/ verify them. People who received their degrees long ago, when their records were not digitised, might have to go through a longer process but for the bulk of degree holders, life could be made a lot easier. The queues outside HEC offices would disappear quickly.
Checks and balances will remain. In a society where corruption, incompetence, and fraud are high, and trust levels low, we will have multiple checks in all processes. We should work on getting trust levels up, but that is a medium- to long-term issue.
It should be someone’s job to make the checks as efficient as possible. Tolls are going to be levied when you enter certain roads and cross some bridges, but what should be the right number of booths and how many of them should work during rush hour is important to figure out. It can save citizens time and hassle.
Firms are under pressure to engineer processes in order to compete and to attract and keep customers. For governments, this pressure does not exist, and given the nature of the state in Pakistan, citizen pressure is also not very effective. Not to design and implement better solutions is costly, counterproductive and reinforces the impression that the state and its organs just do not care.
The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, and an associate professor of economics at Lums.
Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2024