Besides exposing efficiency of healthcare system Corona has also unmasked capability and capacity of our governance,amidst Corona outbreak in our country we can see our healthcare system is striving to deal with this pandemic similarly, it is also visible how outdated,weak, and creeping our governance is,our response to checkmate the spread and lockdown vindicates this argument.
Failure of healthcare system is justificatory considering the unprecedented situation because even world’s most sophisticated healthcare system are appearing to be failing due to rapid surge at a time.However in case of our country the unavailability of even basic data of health service delivery is issue of governance and this is the issue which needs our immediate attention, another fact that demonstrates weak governance is way of district administration and LEAs which are applying traditional administrative methods to trace a person, government needs to understand these are unprecedented times and we need unprecedented decisions and ways to cope with this situation, for e.g tracing in South Korea And Iran took place via mobile penetration which shows their technological and innovative administrative skills. Then there was a issue to identify underprivileged factions of our society to make them have access to the aid of the state amidst lockdown, this again happened due to lack of data, this situation was further exacerbated by the absence of the local governments, had local governments would have been there on ground government would have ask them to collect data of their constituencies and finally underprivileged society could have access aid in more easier and faster way. World has long given up governance system which Pakistan is keep on practising till this day, world has switched on e-governance.This could create a scenario in which, for example, the health ministry could find out the number of ventilators in the country from the trade ministry’s import data in a matter of minutes.Government needs to strengthen its data capacity to know which faction of population is more vulnerable to the risk so those can be supported by income support programmes.Effective government system has pivotal role on ground in kind of crisis or a disaster,corona crisis once again revealed significance of local government system.
Adnan Shah
Khairpur