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War against dengue fever

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PITB: An unheard story in Pakistan!

PITB: An unheard story in Pakistan!

LAHORE

When the metro buses, offering scheduled rides, ply on roads in Lahore and Rawalpindi/Islamabad in a controlled environment and one looks at real-time maps on screens and listens to the automated voice messages on-board, the feeling of being in a developed foreign country is undeniable.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when one looks at reforms the Punjab government, powered by Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), has been introducing in the realm of good governance and public service delivery. The growing e-culture in public departments of Punjab government, from interactive dashboards to smartphone applications, is fast changing the government. Ask anyone in government of Punjab and people can’t seem to run out of superlatives for PITB’s work.

Name any department in Punjab, the PITB’s mark is pretty obvious, be it education, health, agriculture, livestock, law & order and revenue and many more. The Board is spearheading almost all the key initiatives of the Punjab government to provide quality services to the public, data-driven monitoring and automation of operations.

From real-time information on attendance of teachers and students in public schools across the province to repository of free digitised textbooks and disease surveillance, flood monitoring and crime investigation reporting and integrated command, control and communication systems and digitising land records, the PITB is helping drive the reform agenda of the government by implementing a robust monitoring system.

This monitoring system has been effectively used in curtailing dengue, tracking vaccinators, assessing flood damages, and of course subsequent efforts by the Punjab government to introduce reforms and achieve desired improvements. The PITB’s role in education sector, which is something very close to Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s heart, is quite significant and the same has been resulting in different policy interventions from the government.

Today when we appreciate improvement in attendance of teachers and students (above 90 percent) in over 50,000 public schools across Punjab the fact should not be neglected that all this is possible through the monitoring staff, equipped with SIM-enabled tablet PCs developed by the PITB, which allow them to digitally submit monitoring forms during their visits. The system is really helping reducing absenteeism. Similarly it was the PITB designed smartphone-based early epidemic warning system which played a key role in fighting dengue epidemic in 2012. Nonetheless, the PITB is somehow an unheard story in Pakistan!

“What India Can Learn About E-Governance From Pakistan” goes the headline of a prestigious media outlet of neighbouring India in recognition of services being rendered by the PITB, which is being headed by Dr Umar Saif, a LUMS graduate, who holds a PhD from University of Cambridge and Post-Doc from MIT. Last year, the PITB work was mentioned as one of the three global examples of innovation in governance by the World Bank President.

Recently the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government has approached the PITB seeking its technical assistance in developing an android-based monitoring of Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) workers. It is pertinent to mention here that Punjab has successfully developed and implemented monitoring of vaccinators using android phone through its e-vaccination programme “eVaccs”.

According to Aizaz Akhtar, Head of Special Monitoring Unit at Chief Minister’s Office, the Health Department has been benefitting from PITB vis-à-vis the use of technology for better and effective service delivery. “PITB is our key partner in building technology to bring delivery culture in the government of Punjab”, he added. The PITB is also behind one of the significant developments taking place in Punjab Police vis-à-vis reforms in traditional “thana culture”. Through initiatives like Command, Control and Communication, commonly known as IC3, the PITB is engaged in improving operational efficiency of police and to put the force on modern lines. Through the IC3, the PITB is bringing together various elements of Punjab Police operation so that the same work as a unified team.

This team work seems to be at the heart of PITB when one visits its offices at Arfa Software Technology Park, named after Arfa Karim, the child prodigy who died at the age of 16. “The lights are never switched off at the PITB offices”, remarks one PITB employee about the grueling work hours at this organisation.

According to Waqas Hassan, AIG (Crime Analysis & Monitoring), who is focal person for these reforms at IG office, from automation of manual records to online FIR registration the PITB was helping Punjab Police to develop Police Computer System having features such as computerised registration of FIR, handheld biometric verification devices, digitised biometric criminal record database, and human resource management system etc. “An automated system of FIR system has been introduced in 201 police stations in Punjab”, said Waqas. The system along with other components will be replicated in all the districts across the province, he added.

Out of many other public-friendly initiatives the PITB has launched e-Stamping system in order to replace the arcane stamp paper system, fraught with fraudulent practices, and leakage of government revenues. The new system will enable a citizen to acquire a stamp paper within 30 minutes and will cut out fraud and forged transactions. Citizens can get an e-stamp paper through any designated branch of a schedule bank, saving both time and money.

Similarly the ATM-powered water filtration plants initiative to be launched as a pilot project in selective districts of Punjab is aimed at empowering people to reduce wastage of clean drinking water and its proper utilisation. “PITB is benefitting the common man by bringing down the barriers for accessing government services. For instance, with citizen facilitation centres (e-Khidmat Centres), citizens can access 16 government services under one roof without having to wait in long queues, track their applications through an automated process and expect a response within a stipulated time”, said Dr Umar Saif.

It is pertinent to mention here that Dr Saif is also the founding Vice-Chancellor of Information Technology University (ITU) and the first Pakistani to be named as one of the top 35 young innovators in the world (TR35) in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. He is also first Pakistani to receive a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge and that too at the age of 23. He has a long list of international accolades to his name. He also received Siatra-e-Imtiaz (SI) for his services in the field of Information Technology.

The PITB’s success story is certainly a result of putting the right man for the right job, and in this case, the chief minister seems to have found just the right man for his reform agenda in the government.

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Punjab for the computerized Attendance marking in schools

 Pilot Project launched 

Published in Daily Waqt dated January 28, 2014

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Punjab launches the first ever website for e learning in PAKISTAN

Punjab launches the first ever website for  

e learning in PAKISTAN

http://elearn.punjab.gov.pk

The idea that technology can revolutionize education is not new. However, the Internet, coupled with mobile, more affordable end-user gadgetry now lends itself as an enormously powerful digital medium to enhance the teaching and learning experience across the globe. Advances in information technology have enabled the “personalization” of the learning experience by providing access to learning and assessment resources – anywhere, anytime.

eLearn.Punjab aims to facilitate and encourage the use of educational technologies by providing digitized content, relevant supplementary resources, and online assessment tools for students and educators. As a first step, digitized versions of science subject text books for 9th and 10th grades are being made available online – along with links to a sea of supplementary material available over the Web. In future, the same content may also be pre-loaded into laptops or tablets, or made available in the form of CDs. The introduction of online self-assessment features as well as centralized course/content management tools for public schools is also planned.

We would like to make eLearn.Punjab a meaningful and exciting place for learners and educators to go to. We encourage our visitors, private sector entities, and international agencies to explore, contribute, and collaborate with us in this regard. Please visit eLearn.Punjab frequently, and send us your suggestions, feedback, links to resources, possible support via your organization’s CSR initiatives etc.

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Punjab’s model of m-governance

Punjab’s model of m-governance

By Dr Umar Saif

“How do I know that you are not showing the pictures from last year?” The chief minister was getting increasingly irate at the slideshows of pictures being shown as evidence that different government departments were performing activities to prevent another dengue epidemic in 2012. “These do not carry a time-stamp or show the place where these activities were actually performed.”
I came back from that meeting thinking that the biggest challenge for the government, ironically, is to effectively monitor its own work. Did the school teachers show up in class today? Did the drug inspectors actually visit the drug stores before filing their compliance reports? Did the district government staff use the anti-mosquito spray in the neighbourhood’s most vulnerable to a dengue outbreak? Did the sanitary workers fix the sewerage problem before monsoon?
Over the last two years, we, at the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), focused our energies on solving this problem. Our instrument of choice: smartphone. Historically, governments have invested billions in buying personal computers, laptops, data centres and fibre connectivity to power enterprise applications, but adoption has been a perennial challenge. The smartphone naturally solves many challenges at once: it is cheap (less than $100) and portable, intuitive to use, doesn’t require uninterrupted power, includes an embedded GPS device and has an always-on network connection. Most importantly, it has some social value embedded in it: people can use it to call family and friends, their children can play games on it. Unlike a PC, it is typically not handed over to some assistant in a back-office.
Our first application, developed literally over a weekend, was for the City District Government Lahore to track the activities of its dengue prevention field staff. Each worker was given a basic Android phone and our first application enabled the field workers to take a picture of a completed task, tag its GPS coordinates (geo-tag) and upload it to our dashboard. Our system time-stamped the incoming pictures and mapped them to the field worker’s phone numbers. Visualised on a Google map, we instantly started getting a feel of where and when the prevention activities were performed, or not.
As our anti-dengue campaign progressed, we bought 1,500 Android phones and kept refining our applications. The system was used by 17 different government departments and hundreds of field workers, and we have received over 200,000 pictures from all over Punjab. We developed more applications that enabled field entomologists to report Aedes Larvae clusters, as well as health workers to GPS tag the houses of the confirmed patients. With this data flowing in, we built a state-of-the-art epidemic early warning system, which statistically analysed the larvae reports and patient locations, and raised red flags wherever it detected a potential outbreak. This information was promptly shared with the local government to help it target its activities in the most vulnerable areas.
This system has led to a full-blown real-time disease surveillance system in Punjab, tracking all 26 WHO notifiable infectious diseases. Cross-verification of data from our dashboard has become a common practice in the government. The system has been featured by the MIT Technology Review, The Economist, NPR and BBC.
Encouraged by the success of our system for tracking disease outbreaks, the PITB has been working on numerous applications to help the government monitor its own work. Drug inspectors now carry our smartphones to report their visits to pharmacy outlets; visits of livestock EDOs are tracked using our smartphone applications; Lahore police uses our smartphone applications to analyse crime hotspots; agriculture extension workers report their activities using our smartphone applications; the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC) uses smartphone applications to report its cleaning activities after Eidul Azha; this year, monitoring of Hajj facilities for pilgrims was done using our smartphone-based applications. Such is the adoption of our systems that over 25,000 geo-tagged activities were uploaded by the LWMC during the three-day Eid campaign a few days ago. And the chief minister Punjab personally reviewed this data, after every hour!
Going forward, we are developing a platform, in collaboration with the World Bank, which would enable people without an IT background to generate a monitoring application by simply dragging-and-dropping components. We are experimenting with increasingly advanced features. For example, our application for the irrigation department is designed such that the picture of a depth-metre is automatically processed to extract the level of water in a canal — making it difficult to hide the theft of irrigation water in tail canals.
Our model of mobile governance, or m-governance, is quickly taking root in Punjab. The rapid adoption, level of innovation and sophistication of our evolving systems is unprecedented in public sector organisations, especially in developing countries. In the coming year, seven major government departments will heavily start using our smartphone-based monitoring systems — employing over 30,000 smartphones. If we manage to keep our momentum, Pakistan may become one of the leading examples of innovations in m-governance.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 13^th, 2013.

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Zapping mosquitoes, and corruption

Zapping mosquitoes, and corruption

LIVE in a crowded South Asian city and a host of problems—smog, contagious disease, corruption—may plague you. Each winter, the air grows foul. The monsoon season brings mosquitoes, bloodsuckers capable of carrying nasties such as dengue and malaria. As cities expand and people are packed closer, they are more likely to pass on infections. Overwhelmed municipalities, especially if weakened by corruption, offer a weak response. In Lahore, Pakistan’s second-most populous city, there were 21,292 confirmed dengue patients in 2011, a particularly dire year. At least 350 of them died, victims of associated haemorrhages or shock.
The usual response is to send out fogging lorries to spray a choking mixture of insecticide (such as DDT) and kerosene to kill mosquitoes. Public officials also advise residents to drain every reservoir of water near their homes. Mosquito larvae flourish in puddles, even inside old tyres or old flower pots. But foggers sometimes spread their helpful poison too liberally, where no dengue-infected mosquitoes are present, or too rarely, perhaps neglecting poor neighbourhoods. Municipal workers skip puddle-hunting, or fail to tip chemicals into ponds to kill the larvae. Crooked workers sell their insecticides or refuse to spray without bribes from residents.

After their especially grim spell, Lahore’s authorities last year looked for ways to use technology—in particular cheap, widely available smartphones—to help them put up a better fight against the mosquitoes. They equipped 1,500 city workers with $100 smartphones and asked them to take “before and after” photographs of their anti-dengue tasks and to upload images, tagged by location, so that they could be plotted on an online map, made available to the public. They also recorded where larvae were spotted (usually in traps), and reported the locations of known dengue patients.
The resulting data were then analysed to create a visualisation showing where and when dengue was infecting people. It was then possible to predict where dengue-infected mosquitoes would buzz up next, so that fogging and larvae-hunts could be targeted appropriately. The use of smartphones also had more subtle effects. Knowing they were being monitored and tracked in public, municipal workers also applied themselves more assiduously to their tasks. Anyone looking at the online map could see if the work being done in a particular area was adequate—and complain if it was not.
All this seems to have worked. Last year Lahore suffered just 255 dengue cases, and no deaths, says Umar Saif, a computer scientist seconded to the Punjab provincial government who oversaw the tracking side of the project. Strong political interest helped, too. The chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, who was re-elected in May, led daily meetings on the anti-dengue fight. Of course, 2012 might simply have been a milder year for dengue than 2011, so the effectiveness of the new approach will become apparent only after a few more years. Already, however, the Punjab government is extending the use of mobile phones to gather data and improve broader public services.
Other officials, such as veterinarians who are paid to travel to farms to deworm cows, have to take smartphones to record themselves at work and upload geotagged self-portraits to an official website. This makes it possible to check that they are actually turning up for work. They are also required to record the phone numbers of farmers they visit, some of whom are randomly called afterwards to be asked if the service was up to scratch.
Mr Saif is also trying out a model devised by Zubair Bhatti, a former Pakistani local-government official who now works for the World Bank. It involves making random calls to users of public services—including the police, health services and administrative services such as registering property—to inquire about the quality of service and whether they were asked to pay a bribe. Anyone who volunteers his mobile-phone number (so far, more than 1.3m people have signed up) will get a two-minute robocall from Mr Sharif, the chief minister. He explains that they will shortly receive a text message reviewing their encounter with a local official.
Even among the poorest fifth of households, 80% now use phones, so the technology can reach almost everyone. Illiteracy is a problem, but the chief minister’s call alerts a recipient to get help, if needed, with reading the text message when it arrives. It contains a specific question: did the police respond, as required, within 15 minutes of your emergency call? Were you asked for a bribe at the hospital, or when registering property? By collating the responses it is possible to spot problem departments and crooked officials.
Around 25,000-30,000 automated calls are now being made each day, and “we are gathering remarkable data on who is corrupt and where,” says Mr Saif. It is heartening that in the first two months after the scheme began, 60% of respondents said they were happy with their recent experiences of public services. That could help put anger over corruption into perspective. It is striking, too, that many complaints were over unclean offices, unclear fees for official services and petty frustrations, rather than corruption alone.
Either fight, against dengue or shoddy public services, could yet be reversed in Lahore. Smartphones, geotagged photos and canvassing for public feedback only help if the data gathered are acted upon. But phones are letting sunlight shine brighter on the workings of public services in Lahore. If they work as a disinfectant there, others may follow its lead.

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21578520-technology-and-government-how-clever-use-mobile-phones-helping-improve

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PITB's #Plan9 incubator and #Pakistan #startup scene featured on #CNN

PITB's #Plan9 incubator and #Pakistan #startup scene featured on #CNN

All this happens in Arfa Karim Software Technology Park, Build be PMLN for PAKISTAN

 

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Smart policing: Police learn to use digital mapping to tackle crime

Smart policing: Police learn to use digital mapping to tackle crime

LAHORE:  The city police’s investigation wing has launched a mapping programme to identify the most dangerous areas and work out how to tackle crime there.

Police officials have been given smartphones loaded with an application designed by the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) and taught how to use it to map incidents of crime. The board has handed out a total of 83 phones, one to each police station.
Crime Records Office SP Mustafa Hameed Malik told The Express Tribune that three or four Police Record and Office Management Information System (Promis) personnel at each station had been taught to use the smartphone app.
The app allows policemen to enter the FIR number, date of occurrence, time, description and area of jurisdiction for each crime, as well as pictures of the crime scene and the complainant, and mark it on a Google map of Lahore using the GPS in the phone. The data is stored directly to the PITB database web server in real time, currently accessible only to the Investigations DIG and the CRO SP, police sources said.
A source at the PITB said that the main database server shows Google maps marked with the crime data sent from the field by police personnel on their smartphones. A satellite view from 300 metres above ground level shows the place and name of the crime committed. A bubble appears at the spot, upon clicking which the user can see the data entered about the crime and the pictures.

Crimes can be viewed on the map separately or collectively. “The proximity of different crimes in particular areas helps police understand crime trends better, and thus helps devise appropriate strategies to fight them,” said Investigations DIG Zulfiqar Hameed.
He said that the crime mapping was “the first step towards smart policing. It will reduce the crime rate in the city to an extent that will be felt by everyone within six or seven months.”
The training of policemen for the project began on July 31 and 2,500 cases have been marked on the crime map since then. The PITB sources said that personnel at 15 of the 83 police stations in the city had yet to start mapping crimes due to technical problems.
The 83 phones provided to the police came from the PITB, as the Punjab government has not yet approved funds for the project. The PITB sources said that the phones were given to the board by the Punjab government during the elections in order to gauge voting trends.
“As soon as the government approves the PC-1 for the crime mapping project, the PITB will be returned the phones,” said the DIG.
The PC-1, seeking some Rs180 million for the project, has been prepared by the Lahore police and sent to the Planning Commission for approval, he said. Both the chief minister of the Punjab and the prime minister have applauded the project, he added.
Hotspots
The DIG said that incidents of crime were not spread evenly on the map. Clusters he called hotspots accounted for a disproportionate number of crimes.
“The appeal of focusing limited resources on a small number of high crime activity places is straightforward. If we can prevent crime at hotspot locations, then we might be able to reduce total crime,” he said. “Hotspot policing is a big plank of smart policing.” The mapping would allow police to deal with crime “surgically” and would end random patrols, Hameed said. Recent research showed that focused police interventions, such as directed patrols, proactive arrests, and problem-oriented policing were far more effective than random patrolling and picketing, he added.
Hameed said that the new smart policing policy was based on CompStat (comparative statistics or computer statistics), a police management and accountability system originally developed by the New York Police Department and now in use in most of North America.
The model seeks to focus police organisations on specific problems and empower them to identify and solve them. “Given the growing popularity of this approach to crime prevention across the world, it can help executives and policymakers understand what works in preventing crime in hot spot areas,” he said.
SP Mustafa Malik said that a pilot project at four police stations had had positive results. It showed that Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park alone accounted for six per cent of car theft in Lahore.
“Just by focusing on that particular hotspot, we managed to reduce the rate of car theft in the city. Foot patrols followed by patrol maintenance resulted in significant reductions in calls for service. The enforcement of a problem-oriented policing strategy also resulted in significant reductions in total crime incidents, and varying reductions in all subcategories of crime types,” he said.
He added that extra policemen would be deployed in the 10 areas with the most crimes.
Crimes Investigation Agency SP Umer Virk said that the project would have great practical use. “Police officers know the locations in their beats that tend to be trouble spots and are often very sensitive to the signs of potential crimes across their beats. Pinning crime activities on digital maps with dates, times and exact locations will enhance police performance.”
Published in The Express Tribune, August 18^th, 2013.

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Investing in Dreams

Investing in Dreams

Dr. Umar Saif 
Sunday, July 28, 2013 

 

As my car enters the posh surroundings of the Arfa Software Technology Park, I notice a plainly clad girl getting off a rickshaw and briskly walking towards the entrance. The spring in her step belies the haste with which she wants to reach her destination. Maybe she is late for a meeting; maybe she doesn’t want to be seen getting off a rickshaw in these posh settings. As we enter the lift together, I instantly recognize her. Sidra is one of the young entrepreneurs in the startup incubator setup by the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), called Plan9. Sidra, along with her co-founder, Waqas, founded an Internet e-commerce service last year and started selling handmade leather shoes to the world from a warehouse in Okara. Hometown now employs 11 people and uses technology to scale a traditional handicraft business in Pakistan. Two months ago, they closed a deal with Fab.com (world’s top ecommerce store), with customers in European and US markets. Sidra’s company, Hometown, is one of the 30+ IT startups housed in Plan9. Each startup in Plan9 is working on an innovative IT product ranging from fun mobile games to hardware gadgets. However, there is one thing all these entrepreneurs have in common: ambition. No one joins Plan9 to start a “respectable” company with a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Instead, every entrepreneur in Plan9 is pushed to work towards a dream of launching the next Google or Facebook from Pakistan. Government of Punjab, through Plan9, is investing in these dreams. Plan9 provides free, furnished office space in the Arfa Technology Park, laptops, stipends, administrative and legal help, training, funding for travel and access to world-class mentors and investors. The program is structured such that entrepreneurs can walk in with an idea and walk out with a company. Even though Plan9 is the first organized effort by the government in Pakistan to setup an incubator, such facilities are not uncommon in other countries. Seoul has over 300 incubators in one city; many successful companies in US have come out from famous incubators like the Y-Combinator and techstars; countries like Estonia (with the highest number of startups per head in Europe) have many successful incubators that have helped it leapfrog other countries in high-tech entrepreneurship. Another example is Israel, a country, with its successful startup ecosystem, which has produced more NASDAQ listed companies than all of Europe combined! Even one startup like Skype, founded by two young entrepreneurs in Sweden and sold for $8.5 Billion, could be a game changer for Pakistan’s economy. Our entrepreneurs have not disappointed us. Many started turning profits and attracting investments within our six-month incubation cycle. Others learnt the art of constructive failure and made something out of absolute nothing. PeerCloud, company with a struggling product plugged away to pair up with a VC from Khosla Ventures (one of the top Venture Capital firms in the Silicon Valley) who they met through Plan9. Another startup Eyedeus Labs was recently featured by TechCrunch and Gizmodo. Eyedeus Labs is also among the eight lucky startups from around the world selected by Google for Entrepreneurs to attend this summer's Blackbox Connect. At the same time, Plan9 has put together an Angel Investor Club, where successful businessmen in Pakistan get together every few weeks to evaluate Plan9 companies for possible investment. Already grown to a size of over 15 members, this group has also provided us an opportunity to develop a legal and corporate framework for investments in technology companies. In the absence of organized venture capital in Pakistan, we have started looking at governmentsponsored models like SBIC (Small Business Investment Company) in US and Yozma program in Israel to kickstart a VC industry in Pakistan. We believe that Hightech entrepreneurship can be one of the key enablers of our economy. If we can provide the right ecosystem, Pakistan, with a population of 200 times that of Estonia, can be a hub of startups. Statistically, it’s just a matter of time before Pakistan produces a Google or a Skype. And we, at Plan9, will not settle for anything less.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-192887-Investing-in-Dreams

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