Pakistan needs good bureaucrats like this one....

The Jhang model
Saturday, November 01, 2008

The extraordinary feats achieved by a mid-level government official, who served for some years as the DCO Jhang, have not received sufficient notice. The innovative bureaucrat, who has now rather tragically quit government service for personal reasons, had devised a system using which he was, to a very great extent, able to eliminate corruption in his district. Through a painstaking system of record keeping and the daily submission of details regarding property sales or purchase, he had been able to cut corruption in the Revenue Department, a virtual hot-bed of vice. The same initiatives had been extended to hospitals and other spheres. Citizens in one of the most backward districts of Punjab are vocal in the praise of the positive impact made by these measures.

Some DCOs are believed to have attempted similar exercises in their own areas, with varying degree of success. But the Jhang model has not been enforced on a larger scale. Following a report in this publication, the Punjab chief minister had ordered the former DCO's methods to be adopted throughout the province, but this has not happened. We must hope the CM will look into the reasons for this failing. The fact that so much was achieved to tackle malpractice by one man working alone proves to all of us that it is indeed possible to tackle corruption. What is needed is dedication and honest resolve. Sadly, this is too often lacking in our system of governance. Somehow or the other, more effort needs to be made to build a similar spirit so that more districts can walk down the path chalked out so meticulously in Jhang. (The News)

.........

Punjab to emulate Jhang model

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

ISLAMABAD: Chief Minister Punjab Shahbaz Sharif on Tuesday ordered immediate implementation of the incredible ‘Jhang model’ administration in all the districts of the province to reduce corruption and improve service delivery, through citizens’ feedback, in the otherwise inefficient and corrupt departments of revenue, police, health and others.

Shahbaz Sharif, taking notice of last week’s report in The News on the wonders of DCO Jhang Zubair K Bhatti, issued these orders following a presentation given to him by the talented officer, who interestingly has forwarded his resignation from the government service citing personal reasons.

Sources close to the officer, however, say that inadequate compensation package is the reason for the officer’s decision to quit the government job and join the private sector.

Sources said that Shahbaz Sharif, who is an exception amongst the country’s top politicians for his faith in good governance and the rule of law, tried to persuade the officer to review his decision to leave the government job and also offered him special pay package but Bhatti said that he had given his word to a private organisation that he would be joining soon.

This mid-career bureaucrat has done wonders in a Punjab district by remarkably reducing corruption in the otherwise most corrupt revenue department’s registry offices, amongst the Patwaris, in the government hospitals etc., by simply asking the concerned officials to submit daily the list of all property transactions registered with mobile numbers of both sellers and buyers, the total amount of taxes due and other basic details of transactions.

Similar orders were given to Patwaris in cases where fard were given. The clerks of the revenue department were told that the officer would personally call all these citizens on their mobile phone to find out if they were asked to pay any bribe or commission above and beyond the taxes due, if any. He did the same and within a few weeks’ time, things changed miraculously as far as getting of a fard or intiqal done and the registration of property was concerned.

Bhatti talks to different buyers of the property or those getting fard or intiqal in the district or those treated/ operated in the government hospital or those getting domicile/ birth/death certificates etc on their mobile numbers to know if they had paid only the taxes due or were also forced to grease the right palms. He also presented to the chief minister voluminous record of different district departments along with the mobile numbers of citizens who had interacted with any official agency, with an offer to contact the ordinary souls on any of the given mobile numbers to see a change in service delivery in the Jhang district.

The threat of personal and intimate feedback communicated directly to the DCO and the possibility of anti-corruption action had a massively deterrent effect, the DCO said, adding that when he made calls and asked about the quality of service, he generally found out that petty hassles had mostly been eliminated.

The chief minister in his order said that not only the Zubair Bhatti model would be implemented in all the districts of the province but would also be expanded. The officer, in his presentation, had proposed the following steps to be taken to scale up and institutionalize this feedback to tackle petty corruption.

1. Identification of interactions: All interactions at field level by various departments need to be identified that could be amenable to such feedback.

2. The following are some possibilities. Departments should be asked to come up with such interactions with officials.

DCO Office

i. Getting a domicile

ii. Getting arms licence

iii. Getting NOC for petrol pumps

Police

i. Registering an FIR

ii. Follow-up on investigation and submission of challans

iii. Getting a driving licence

iv. Getting NOC for various security purposes

v. Payment of tickets for traffic fines

Health

i. Getting a medico-legal certificate

ii. Getting an operation done in DHQ, THQ and most importantly an RHC: Have doctors charged for services? Have they promoted their private practice?

iii. Charge of purchee fee: Have excess funds been charged?

iv. All recruitments: Have any funds, small or large, changed hands

Revenue Department

i. Both parties to a revenue case: Has the reader been charging? Is the copying clerk doing his work properly? Has the presiding officer been directly getting the money? Has the lawyer spoken to the plaintiff or the defendant that the presiding officer has to be paid?

ii. Getting a fard

iii. Getting an intiqal done

iv. Registering a property

Live Stock Department

i. Has the doctor or the dispenser charged extra for the service or the medicines?

Excise and Taxation Department

i. Registration of vehicles

ii. Assessment and payment of property taxes

Education Department

i. All transfers and postings

ii. All recruitments

Local Government

i. Registering births, deaths, and nikah.

He also suggested development of reporting formats for each interaction: for example, the reporting format for registration of property should include name, date, property, estimated value, total taxes needed to be paid, the name and cell number of buyer (or any immediate relative who conducted the process of registration); for medico-legal cases, the name of the person, NIC, cell number of the person or a near relative involved in the process of getting a medico-legal done, nature of injury, police station, medical establishment (RHC, THQ, or DHQ) be recorded.

The presentation also sought entry of data submitted everyday in a database, preparation of relevant monitoring reports, monitoring at provincial level, taking action against corrupt elements with clear identification of corruption and corrupt persons.

To begin with, officials of lower grade and officers of grade-17 or 16 responsible for field formations should be the main target of such disciplinary actions. Performance of DCOs and EDOs would also be monitored with reference to reduction in incidents of corruption in their areas of jurisdiction.

http://thenews.jang.com.pk/print3.asp?id=15883
Read more...

The genius of Jhang: Dr Abdus Salam

(Zahida Hina, 23 Nov 2008, Express)


.......

The genius of Jhang: Dr Abdus Salam
By Ahmad Faruqui (Daily Dawn)

EVERY October, the Nobel Academy announces the names of individuals whose genius has earned them its coveted prize.

The winners are awarded the prize by the King of Sweden in a formal ceremony. The prize in physics garners much attention, focusing as it does on the fundamental forces of nature.

So it was with great wonderment on Dec 10, 1979 that those who were gathered to witness the physics award saw a tall, bearded figure walk towards the stage. The very antithesis of western formalism, the man was draped in a long fully buttoned black suit with a closed upright collar, white baggy pants and white turban. Decorative shoes that could have come out of the Arabian nights completed the profile.

The man was Prof Abdus Salam. He had the honour of being the first scientist from the Muslim world to get the Nobel. His presence was a visible reminder of how far the young boy from the obscure town of Jhang on the banks of the Chenab had come.

Abdus Salam had shown evidence of brilliance at a young age by scoring the highest marks ever in a matriculation examination in Punjab. After studying at Government College, he went to Cambridge University (St John’s College), where he scored a double first in mathematics and physics and later obtained a doctorate. He would later teach at Government College, Imperial College (London) and the International Centre for Advanced Physics (Trieste, Italy).

Even though he had started out as an experimental physicist, he quickly turned into a theoretician, citing his lack of patience for accumulating data and working with “recalcitrant equipment”. His focus was on subatomic particles and the forces of attraction and repulsions that existed between them.

A century earlier, British scientist James Clerk Maxwell had shown that electricity and magnetism were two manifestations of a common electromagnetic force. Others had shown in the early part of the 20th century that a ‘weak’ nuclear force existed between subatomic particles and was responsible for phenomena such as beta-radioactive decay. This happens when a neutron in the nucleus spontaneously shoots off an electron as it turns itself into a proton, hence transmuting the element. However, the best available theory of weak force reactions by Enrico Fermi was known to be only valid at low energy levels.

In the 1960s, Abdus Salam, along with two Americans, put together a theory that described the weak force and electromagnetism as low-energy manifestations of a single ‘electroweak’ force. This theory agreed with all the observed data and behaved nicely at higher energy levels, unlike Fermi’s.

But there was a catch. It relied on the existence of several new particles that had never been seen in any prior experiment. One of these implied a set of ‘weak neutral current’ reactions, a brand new concept.

The Nobel was awarded to Abdus Salam and his co-researchers once the existence of the particles implied by their theory was confirmed by experimental scientists at CERN, the European test facility in Geneva. Prof Salam’s Nobel lecture, ‘Gauge unification of fundamental forces’ was a model of scientific eloquence (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1979/salam-lecture.html).

Almost three decades later, his electroweak theory still stands, despite an extraordinary amount of testing. It has led to the development of the Standard Model in particle physics (quantum chromo-dynamics), which combines the electroweak theory with the ‘strong force’ theory.

However, from the days of Einstein onwards, no one has been able to integrate gravitation with the other three forces. Grand unification of the four fundamental forces remains an aspiration for future physicists. In science, theories are only interesting if they can be rejected. In his Nobel lecture, Prof Salam quoted from Einstein to affirm his belief in empirical testing: “Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.”

One of the loose ends in the Standard Model is the existence of the Higgs boson, which is still to be observed. Physicists around the world are anticipating that once the multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider at CERN that runs under the Franco-Swiss border is operational again, it will be able to test for the existence of the Higgs boson.

It is fitting that the life and work of Prof Salam have been celebrated in a new biography by Gordon Fraser, Cosmic Anger (Oxford, 2008). In the book, Abdus Salam emerges not just as a world-renowned scientist but as a humanist committed to the advancement of the developing world and as a humble man with a tremendous sense of humour.

During the Ayub era, he served as chief scientific adviser to the president and was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. In those days he inspired countless students in Pakistan to pursue the physical sciences.

Unfortunately, serious policy differences between him and the country’s top leadership surfaced when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ascended to power. Bhutto was committed to bringing a nuclear weapons capability to Pakistan even if that meant, as he famously put it, that Pakistanis would have to eat grass for a thousand years. Prof Salam disagreed with Bhutto’s idea and felt it was ill-suited to a country as poor as Pakistan. Further difficulties arose with the passage of a law that excommunicated people of his faith from Islam.

A deeply religious man, Prof Salam was heartbroken. That year, with much anguish, he left the country for good.

He came back only once, at the behest of President Zia who wanted to recognise his achievements to the cause of science in Pakistan. He continued his work in the years that followed and travelled widely to compare notes with scientists around the world.

In 1996, at the age of 70, Prof Salam passed away in Oxford after a prolonged illness. But his legacy lives on. Many centres and professorships are named after him across the globe. His work continues to inspire new generations of graduate students to seek out the mysteries of particle physics.

But one would be hard pressed to find much evidence of his legacy in the land of his birth. That is a genuine tragedy since Pakistani science attained a high-water mark during his tenure that has yet to be surpassed.

The writer is the author of Musharraf’s Pakistan, Bush’s America and the Middle East.

faruqui@pacbell.net
Read more...