Daily Times

An old saying from South India goes something like this; “If you go out in a jungle looking for a tiger, be sure you want to see one”. The wisdom in this simple but powerful sentence is profound. Often, we set ourselves goals and targets without really knowing what these entail; how to get there and whether we really want or need to get there, in the first place?

The desire of reforming the public sector institutions is predicated upon many assumptions, all of which are rarely put to the test of empirical reasoning in the heat of the moment.

Unless diagnostics are right, meting out treatments merely by the cursory understanding of outward symptoms will take us either nowhere or somewhere where we will actually be worse off.

One can start with some real life examples from Pakistan’s public sector.

Every second day, we hear people bemoan about “pendency” in courts; that tens of thousands of cases are “pending” in the district courts. But exactly how one reaches at this figure of “pendency” is rarely questioned.

Total number of undecided cases in a given moment are picked up and quoted as delay; whose approach is patently wrong.

Based upon the provisions of our legal system, any civil or criminal case has to go through several “legitimate time consuming” stages before which no verdict can be handed out — institution, filing of reply, evidence, arguments, counter- arguments, rebuttal, all the way to judgement. A case may well be passing through one of these legitimate, time consuming stages of legal process, inside the valid time span but will be counted as pending. Rather than first working out the average or median time for the disposal of a case and segregating genuinely pending cases, from those within allowable time-spans, our zealous reformers will lump all instituted cases as pendency and set on to reform this “pendency in court system”. Wastage of precious resources and time can be the only consequence.

Is it really feasible to try to reform everything and anything that comes in your way?

Police reform also falls in the same category. Nobody can argue the desirability of a functional public safety system which has police — the coercive arm of the state — as its crucial pillar. But the dilemma of not clearly figuring out what actually constitutes police reforms — knowingly or unknowingly — can frustrate even the noblest of efforts.

Constructing IT-enabled police stations, opening FIR counters at airports, establishing women police stations, making SHO an arbitrating jirga councilor, inaugurating primary schools in police lines or arranging blood donation camps with garlanded officers as chief guests are all wonderful initiatives. But unless, rate of conviction in the courts of law is seen to be substantially improving (as a result of efficient investigation and prosecution as well as the nabbing of proclaimed offenders), any claim to progress on police reforms on the strength of the afore-mentioned measures needs to be challenged.

In case of court pendency, the problem lies in wrong diagnostic — we really do not know what cases should be termed as pending. In the second case of police reform, the fault lies in not figuring out the “correct police reform outcome indicator” — improved conviction rate which is amongst the lowest in Pakistan.

A third example, of wrongly or partially knowing reform challenges and moving with simplistic assumptions can be found in the latest discourse pertaining to the local government system in Punjab.

Reform leadership seems convinced (and mostly for the right reasons) that the latest Local Government experiment in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has been a success story; hence a desire to replicate it in Punjab.

What we are missing so far in this discourse are correct diagnostics. Punjab’s local governance challenge is primarily the challenge of urban or perhaps “peri-urban” mal-governance. Urban sprawl Genie in Punjab is totally out of bottle. Needless to say, the rural landscape in southern and western Punjab also suffers from gross under-development. But expecting the village and neighbourhood council model, of the KP Local Government system is absurd. Moreover allocating thirty percent automatic resource transfer from provincial ADP, to work and deliver in Punjab is frankly far-fetched.

Designers of future local governance system for the province will need to be clear that Punjab is well advanced on urban mobility themes — metros and orange lines; that Punjab has unique service delivery institutional landscape — Health and Education Authorities in districts; that Punjab has a dedicated Civil Administration Law for handling district and divisional administration and corporatisation of governance and so on. These and other governance peculiarities in Punjab will need some very serious, fully informed debates, before playing with the existing system.

And this is what brings me to the last part of my argument; is it really feasible to try to reform everything and anything that comes in your way? In other words, given our complex political economy situation, challenges of verifiable data availability on public sector performance, clarity on “what should not be reformed” and “what can be reformed without reforming” is absolutely crucial for saving precious energy or resources alongside minimizing “Reform Outcome Frustration”.

Contemplating full-scale judicial reforms sounds great but strengthening and modernising the existing system of MIT (Member Inspection Team) and High Court Registrar offices in each province can quickly lead to delay reduction. This will also lead to quality improvements through a rigorous monitoring regime within district judiciary. There are over one dozen inspection registers, covering the A to Z of policing, sitting in each police station which supervisory Police Officers (SDPos, DPOs etc.) are mandated to inspect and scrutinize. Due diligence by supervisory Police Officers on this count alone can lead to massive improvements in the quality of investigation and efficient watch and ward function in a very short time period. Patwaris may be hard nuts to crack but if Revenue Officers ( ACs, DCs, Commissioners ) can take out their “precious time” and ensure timely completion of Gardawari” and compulsorily attend to their original inspection and judicial work as “revenue courts officers”, blessings of land title security — core state function — can be ensured in the shortest possible time.

A massive overhaul of the Local Governance System is a noble intention but ensuring functional independence to WASAs (who presently answer to multiple offices) through a few legal amendments in just two provincial laws can ensure a supply of clean drinking water and waste disposal to several crore citizens across Punjab, in a matter of months. Existing institutions of rural uplift such as ABAD and others — with proper tweaking and resourcing — can lead to fast track development in less developed and arid districts of western, southern and northern Punjab. Both these measures can save the pains of a massive local government system overhaul.

Encompassing, ambitious reform discourse and waging fierce battles on multiple fronts is never advisable — especially in Pakistan’s public sector. Going for select; low input-high output doable targets while staying within existing institutional and legal ambits is the safest bet for public sector reforms.

But then what to do with our penchant and passion for those magical lines from the great poet Faiz sung by equally great singer Iqbal Bano about “hurling the crown ” and “ toppling the throne”?

The Writer is a retired PAS officer who has worked in District, Provincial and Federal Governments and can be reached at syedrizwanmehboob@gmail.com

Published in Daily Times, September 23^rd 2018.