The government of Pakistan earmarks annually a huge sum for its employees working in the federal and all provincial governments to enhance their working capacity for the betterment of their departments. Government officers intending to get education and skills abroad are also funded. All four provincial governments plan and announce courses for their thousands of employees regularly. Course related to the information technology have been arranged time and again and the employees have learnt a lot from these courses and trainings.
The government is investing too much in providing technical or hard skills, leaving a huge vacuum to plan the soft skills training for its employees. The soft skills are as important for the employees as any other training is. The importance of soft skills is very much felt for the employees of government functionaries as they are found very much carefree about their behavior. I can cite an example of a ten-storied complex of Karachi, formerly known as Civic Centre, where dozens of offices are housed. Neither employees having their offices there nor do thousands of people visiting the ten-storied daily do much care. Employees are in general and various unions in particular paste their posters, obituaries of their colleagues and even their relatives, papers lashing out a policy in fractured Urdu and many more without giving much care to the colour of wall and window panes.
To remove this rubbish from the wall and window panes, the organization concerned has to outsource a team of workers almost after every month. Every corner of the staircase has a dust bin for the pan chewers and gutca users to spit but many corners of the ten-storied shows a dismal picture of its employees and visitors’ carelessness.
Sumito Mizusawa, a scholar from Kyoto University, Japan, intending to carry out his academic research on the private schools in rural areas of Pakistan, visited my office in the Civic Centre recently, he was astonished to see the wall and window panes littered with posters, announcements, threats, criticism, obituaries and good-news and asked me “don’t they have a particular place to paste their posters and announcements?”. I was nonplused.
With the situation in view, I request the government employees in general and public in particular to review their habit of spitting pan and to say goodbye these habits. I also request the members of all unions to use many other mediums to disseminate their view points and avoid habit of pasting such stuff. SMS could be a better option in this regard.
JAWED AHMED KHURSHEED
Karachi
