Sir: According to news reports, Pakistanis residing in the Saudi kingdom are the highest contributors to the foreign remittances Pakistan receives. They contribute 29.5 percent of the total, according to statistics taken from the last fiscal year. Despite this high remittance rate, the quality of service the Pakistani embassy in Riyadh provides to its people is very low. They struggle to get answers to simple queries such as what their working hours are and how to go about getting a new passport? They fail to cater to such queries even through telephone and their website. If one goes to their website via the ministry of foreign affairs’ portal, they will see a static page with lots of telephone numbers on it. Their main phone number is always busy during working hours. During non-working hours, nobody picks up. If one were to try any of the other numbers, they will connect them to the exchange and ask for an extension that never gets through. In my umpteen tries, I have never been able to talk to a human being. Numerous people have raised this issue on web forums but to no avail. It is not difficult to fix this in today’s IT era, when Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) call centre solutions are easily and cheaply available. Another solution is to divert all such query calls to Pakistan and set up a call centre there.
The internet is the perfect tool to resolve such scenarios. The Pakistani consulate in Jeddah has Facebook and Twitter accounts, which respond quickly to all queries. They also have a very informative website and have announced an appointment system to avoid passport application queues. They have a FAQ guide on their website as well; it is not very helpful but, at least, it answers some of the basic queries. Riyadh’s embassy sadly does not have any of this. E-mail is something still very alien to them. Even if there is an address listed somewhere, one can rest assured that they will never get a response. I do accept the fact that our embassy is overstretched and under-resourced. Keeping in mind how much we contribute to our country’s economy, this is completely unacceptable. Some advanced countries’ embassies, after office hours, route their calls to their foreign office in their home country. I am not asking for that level of support but I am asking for a simple yet efficient way of getting in touch with the embassy.
BABAR HAQ
Via e-mail