Whereas poor law and order situation has mentally disturbed millions of people living in the metropolitan, the officials of the Sindh Home Department, the headquarters of all the security agencies, have started hiding their identity in official documentation while even their offices do not contain any names plates.
The offices of the home department officials, which were housed at the ground floor of the Tughlaq House, Sindh Secretariat, did not contain the official nameplates of the officers concerned, except that their designation plates were displayed. Sources opined that the move had been taken keeping in view the security situation of the city, per information collected by Pakistan Today.
Interestingly, the officials also avoided mentioning their names on documents, particularly the ones marked as confidential.
The only reasons for hiding their identity was cited to be security threats to the officials who were dealing with the law and order matter in collaboration with security agencies, including police, army, rangers and the Frontier Constabulary (FC).
Moreover, the visitors who used to visit the home department to sort out their issues related to security and issuance of arms licenses, were finding it difficult to search out the official concerned.
The offices of the high ups of the department, including home secretary, special secretary, additional secretary (admin), additional secretary law enforcement (LE) and additional secretary judicial, deputy secretaries and eight section officers (SOs), prison department and judicial department were housed at the ground floor of New Sindh Secretariat Building, the sources said.
Talking to Pakistan Today, officials at the home department said that the department had not installed nameplates of the officials due to security concerns. Besides, the officials also did not issue official visiting cards to the officers for the same reason.
According to the sources, another reason was that the cards had reportedly been misused in the past too. Furthermore, they said that haphazard transfers and a permanent sense of insecurity in the wake of poor law and order situation were two other reasons for the absence of nameplates outside the officers workplace.
As a precaution, the officers of the home department also did not write their names on any order containing a punitive step to avoid backlash from the respondent. Being one of the major government departments, the home department, was visited by hundreds of people from government and non-government institutions in a quest to get their problems resolved, but they could often be found wandering here and there to locate the office and officer that they wanted to meet, the sources added.
The sources further said that in the absence of identity-plates outside offices, most of the visitors mistakenly knocked or entered the wrong offices and caused disturbance to the officers and staffers.
