Provinces Look to Adopt Punjab Model for Digital Growth

The spillover effect in a positive way is essential for the overall growth of the country. It implies that if a province within a country is more developed in some aspect like technology, it should also transcend to other provinces. In the case of technology, we know that Punjab is the leader whether we talk about tech incubators or apps for carrying out different administrative tasks. Therefore, all provinces should follow Punjab Model for digitization.

So we can say that Punjab is the province where you can see comparatively high digital growth. At the heart of the digitization is the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), which has primarily digitized nearly all sorts of provincial departmental and administrative tasks ranging from excise to anti-narcotics.

Provinces Look to Adopt Punjab Model for Digital Growth

The Board has played a vital role in fostering a culture of technology and innovation, a fact best illustrated by its launch of Plan 9 and Plan X, the incubation and acceleration centres that have provided a lift-off to a number of startups. In addition to that, it has developed a total of 99 apps on Google’s Play Store that is also very impressive.

Now we will talk about other provinces and how they are planning to follow the Punjab Digitization Model:

KPK:

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa plans to follow Punjab’s central point of authority model. Under the administration of Brunel University graduate Dr. Sahibzada Ali Mahmud, the KP Information Technology Board (KPITB) is striving to concentrate more on centralizing its operations and working on e-governance options. However, in the present time most of the KP’s technology initiatives are initiated by different departments, with the tourism department developing its own application and the police department working on its own digital platform.

According to Dr. Mahmud,

This makes “monitoring at a higher level very difficult since there is no centralization of data. Hence they want to follow the PITB model.

Sindh:

Simultaneously, Sindh has faced a number of problems due to, its decentralized model of technology adoption. A Sindh IT Board was actually established last year, with the purpose of building a PITB-like provincial IT body that hires from the private sector and can lead to rapid digitization.

Balochistan:

Unfortunately, the situation in the largest province is the worst. In fact, the cabinet doesn’t even have a provincial IT minister. However, there is a glimpse of hope. The province has formulated a Digital Policy comprising of six main pillars: access and infrastructure; literacy, skills and technology; digital services/cities/e-governance; digital promotion and transformation; digital security, disaster, rights and responsibilities; and the digital economy.

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