President urges civil servants to improve service-delivery, ensure good governance

Lahore : (Nasir Abbas)President Dr Arif Alvi has urged civil servants to work with dedication and commitment to improve service delivery and ensure good governance in the country. He also underscored the need to take timely and faster decisions to keep pace with the rest of the world. Addressing the successful graduates of the 118th Senior Management Course (SMC) and 33rd National Management Course (NMC) at the National School of Public Policy here on Friday, he said that Islam was a community-based religion and it emphasized serving the poor and showing utmost compassion to them. “A civil servant must interact with the public and be easily accessible to them in order to address their problems. This principle has been practised by great caliphs of Islam”, Dr Alvi said, adding that the welfare of the community should be the first priority of a civil servant. He further said that brilliant civil servants were an antidote to the state's ills and that people with the right attitude could change the world around them. He remarked that the country needed such people more than before as the country was faced with multiple challenges. Dr Alvi urged the civil servants to follow in the footsteps of the former great civil servants and become a source of resistance against hypocrisy and corruption, besides ensuring good governance. The President said that keeping pace with modern knowledge was also vital to national progress and the bureaucracy must play its role in steering the country out of its problems and put it on the path to progress. Highlighting the role of training institutions like NSPP and NDU, the President said that these institutions could better train civil servants and equip them with relevant skills to address the administrative and governance issues. Earlier, Director NSPP, Dr Ijaz Munir welcomed President Dr Arif Alvi and thanked his constant patronage of the institution. Throwing light on salient features of the high-profile training institution, he said NSPP did not confine itself to academics but also provided training on practical strategy and policyd formulation. The Director NSPP further said that scholarships were also being awarded to the toppers of the SMC and NMC training and they were being sent to Harvard University. Earlier, President Dr Arif Alvi distributed certificates among the successful graduates of the SMC and NMC.