Tiger force’s employment is hope and not a plan

Leading newspapers carried headline news that Prime Minister has decided to get help from the Tiger force for surveillance of government offices that include prices of essential items, health facilities, keep an eye on markets, educational institutions, public places, police stations, katchery, land record ,electricity theft and people complaint. In fact it will cover anything. Approximately 100000 Tiger workers will come in action. It appears that such schemes are deliberately prepared and presented to Prime Minister to divert his attention from main issues and to create problems for him without realising its impact on public and the consequences. Recent example is proposed increase in TV licence fee from Rs 35 to Rs 100 that has been shelved due to strong protest by the people, but no action against scheme floater. Under the name of restructuring you prematurely retire people to please the boss by showing savings of millions of rupees but at what cost? To achieve this you don’t require consultants, this task can be performed by any superintendent. It will be worthwhile to quote personal example while serving in MNC few years back, the MD desired to cut down manpower third time by 10 people. Accordingly names of 10 people were forwarded; on the top I put my name. MD called me and asked me that why I had put my name. My straight answer was that sir don’t lay off 10 poor people instead accept my resignation as I can manage but the lower staff will be ruined. After great reluctance the proposal was approved.
We all know that Prime Minister is very sincere and keen to solve problems of poor people who are fed up with rampant corruption in all the offices and the red tapism. It is also true that everyone is appreciative of such steps, but the modus operandi is not correct and does not fit in the scheme due to our typical environment and culture if one critically looks at the ground realities. Just to recall Prime Minister established Pakistan Citizens Portal (PCP) where any aggrieved person including overseas Pakistanis could file their complaints against any department and get their complaints processed was a good initiative because it is personally monitored by PM, but as the time passed things slowed down and PM was unhappy and showed his annoyance due to poor performance of officers who were deputed to manage the complaints. The PM was pleased to order reinvestigation of more than 100000 complaints and also issued red letters to 16 ministries on poor performance. Question arises if the Prime Minister has to attend to routine complaints that mean system is not working, officers are not performing, under the circumstances won’t it be better to change the system and change the officer instead creating new system to redress the issues?
To resolve problems specially in Pakistan the only solution is to correct the faults in the existing system of working and change the mind set and attitude of the people deployed to run the system, punish them throw them out of jobs. The solution does not lie in creating more offices. If we indulge in this futile exercise it will end up in more mess, delays and ultimately everything will collapse.
The duties assigned to Tiger force that was created in March 2020 as Corona Relief Tiger Force and we witnessed their role during spread of corona virus pandemic there was nothing special about it. Now giving them new role is in direct conflict of various administrative offices established to take care of problems of people for which billions of rupees are spent annually to run these offices, they would feel insecure and shall never cooperate with the members of Tiger force. Whosoever has given this bright idea to PM has done great disservice to him. How can you superimpose Tiger force worker to monitor the working of bureaucrats who even don’t care about their own bosses, it will create lot of problems and further complicate the matters, who would know better than PM himself who has many a times complained on the performance of bureaucracy. Government has established different administrative departments for the public service and welfare of people, they all work under proper supervision of seniors, they shall never allow such force to interfere with their work and take it insult and direct interference in their domain
Let us recollect creation of Federal Security Force (FSF) by Zuliqar Ali Bhutto in 1972, the principal task was his personal protection .In time, the FSF emerged as a paramilitary organisation. The FSF was created in line with the Bhutto’s concept of counter balancing power and diminishing the importance of the Army, especially for the maintenance of the domestic disorder by opponents, what happened after his ouster from power. The DG FSF turned approver against him on Kasuri murder. However, it was disbanded by Gen Zia being superfluous and burden on national exchequer. Likewise we have many ombudsmen to attend the grievances of the public against federal, provincial, and corporation officials for the injustices being done. We also have federal services tribunal for redress of grievances of government officials where one has to wait for years to get the decisions. For appeal we have High Courts and Supreme Court. We keep creating new departments instead correcting the existing ones and giving quick punishment found guilty of their wrong actions.
Rudimentary measures like super imposing an informal domestic force to supervise a well structured hierarchy will not benefit and sustain the reformist agenda of PM Imran Khan. He needs to utilize the existing social and institutional structures to propel his reformist agenda.