LAHORE    -    Federal Minister for Planning, Develop­ment and Special Initiative Ahsan Iqbal has said that civil services should be modernised and bureaucrats should be given training on modern lines in three branches including Foreign Services, Fi­nance and Economics and Media to run the country in a better way. Addressing the concluding ceremony of the 32nd Senior Management Course (SMC) and 117th National Management Course (NMC) held at the National Institute of Management here on Friday, he said that the world was changing with each pass­ing day and the country would have to change with the pace of the world‘s de­velopments to tackle these changes.

He suggested that a training school for bureaucrats like the National De­fense University should be established in which education, training and research should be focused and a special certifi­cate should be given to those bureau­crats who pass out from the school. He said that the best bureaucrats should be brought in the school as trainers and spe­cial approval should be obtained from the Ministry of Finance in this regard.

He said that modern education like ar­tificial intelligence should also be taught to the bureaucracy. The minister said that bureaucrats should know how they could work for progress of the country. He listed six suggestions for the purpose. Number one is introduction and imple­mentation of peace and harmony in so­ciety and the second one is to provide regulatory to the governments by the bu­reaucracy, he said. The minister said that the current governing model is out-dated and only that bureaucrat would be serve the country successfully who would make a team by taking the community, business and society on board. For the 4th one, he said that a good coordination among the interior, foreign, finance and other departments play a vital role in the country’s progress whereas it was ob­served that the officer of one department delayed the file of the other department.

Sharing the fifth suggestion, the min­ister said that bureaucrats should learn how to deal the public with pleasant ges­ture with an impact of pleasure for peo­ple, adding that people would give more taxes if they were happy with the gov­ernment. He said that the last and sixth suggestion was that the civil services personnel should learn new things and remain updated with the fresh knowl­edge, as the knowledge about everything gets outdated after every five to seven years. He said that the nation would be eliminated if it did not learn to live with the modern systems of the globe. The minister said that it was attempted to put the country on the track in 1997 and then in 2013, but unfortunately the political instability always de-tracked the country. He said that just after four-year period, when there was shortage of energy and Pakistan was facing terror­ism, ambassadors of all big developed countries used to ask where should they invest in the CPEC [China-Pakistan Eco­nomic Corridor] initiative.

He said that in just four years, the country started producing 11,000 mega­watts of electricity and advantage of bil­lion dollars to the economy but, unfortu­nately the political tension at that time had destroyed everything the govern­ment had done at that time. The minister said the development budget had been increased from Rs 350 billion to Rs 1000 billion but later there were no funds for the development projects.