LAHORE - The Open Data Initiative (ODI) launched by the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) will help the citizens to obtain information under the Punjab Transparency and Right to Information law.
It was stated by the PITB Chairman Dr Umar Saif while talking in a meeting on Thursday. He explained that under this innovative programme, the PITB was working with government agencies to establish a functional system through which quality information could be made available to the public on a web platform in easy-to-use and interactive open formats which allow citizens to search, aggregate, compare and view data according to their need.
“The initiative has been started in collaboration with the World Bank and Information Technology University Lahore and it will be operationalised up to tehsil level in the province,” he held.  Dr Saif revealed that the datasets uploaded so for contain information related to the population census, agriculture census, ADPs, development schemes, budget, salaries, Mauza (village) mapping, Multiple Index Cluster Survey, Education and Health Management Information System and Household Integrated Economic Survey etc while the work on other fields is in progress.
He claimed that this online accessibility and transparency of information could lead to the creation of an effective system of government responsibility and accountability. He further elaborated that through crowd-sourcing of data the citizens would also be able to monitor and provide feedback on government projects through different media such as SMS services, mobile applications, web-portals and Geo-tagging of project site photographs thus creating two-way communication between the government and its people.
“The availability of reliable and good quality government data through this project will also be of immense benefit to people from different fields including journalists, researchers, policy-makers and academics,” he added.