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GOVERNMENT: "If the citizens of Pakistan claim that they are desperate
with the current situation in the country, they should take on the
responsibility and should start doing something from their own rather 
than just blaming the government."

How to Employ the Pakistani Youth
For the Betterment of Governmental
Organizations in Pakistan?
How to overcome the stagnancy of governmental 
organizations in Pakistan?
By Saira Yousaf
Thursday, November 6, 2008

From the time when I heard my father saying that Pakistan is prospering and will definitely be among the best nations in the world, it always used to make me feel proud. And it still does, but what are the factors which are forcing everybody to think so pessimistically that neither the media nor any other citizen seems to be that much proud the way they used to feel five or six years before. I got answers of all these questions when I got opportunity to work in a government organization. In the span of six to eight weeks period, I realized that Pakistan is not that much stagnant nor it lacks potential. In fact it needs to employ the underutilized resources which could make maximum benefits out of the current ways of doing things.

Being a business student, I am trained to be flexible so that I can face the challenges of the rapid and dynamic corporate environment.  In Pakistan, business graduates are made familiar with the same business strategies which are taught in foreign countries. They are taught to be ambitious, hard working and competitive so that they can keep pace with the international business environment. But what happens when a business graduate actually steps into the real corporate environment and finds the real world quite different to what he/she had thought of. The same thing happened with me when I got a chance to work with HRIS team of a renowned government organization. In the first day of interview, I got impressed with the quality discussion with their HR manager and decided to work in the organization.  Later on, this experience made me learn lots of important facts which I would never have learnt before working in that organization.

It made me realize that why we are so stagnant and why government organizations are so bureaucratic. I learnt to know the importance of HR desperately when I saw employees wasting the resources. I saw employees typing two lines in twenty minutes, coming late, spending more than half of the time doing nothing, staying late for the sake of showing others and having fun. The pitfall is that more than 75% of the Pakistani government organizations have employees of more than 40 years old; means leaving no space for young blood. These employees are not well equipped with computer skills although they have been provided basic computer training. Most of the employees who are sitting in these organizations for having service more than 25 years were recruited on the basis of their matriculation or F.Sc. degree which is very insufficient qualification for performing job in today’s competitive environment. The top management is spending lots of money on automation and their IT systems are really good enough to be matched with the demands of the current business needs. But most of the people do not even know how to e-mail a file using internet.

I felt bad actually when I realized that most of the people are taking very high salaries which could be granted to the deserving young talent which are currently unemployed. These institutions are running solely on the basis of top management decisions and some very few people in the organization which somehow are able to complete their work at the end of the day. The only thing which needs to be changed in the government organizations is ‘People’. When unproductive people will be replaced by the young blood like us, the organization re-structuring will automatically occur and can help in exploring the underutilized resources which in this case is the Pakistani ‘Youth’.

The developed economies such as Germany, Japan, France, China and other countries in the Global North are worried about the declining rate of youth population in the coming decades. India which is making progress rapidly because of the effective utilization of its youth population will have the world’s largest youth population till 2050. However in Pakistan, the trend is changing but at slow speed. A greater percentage of youth is coming towards private sector. In my opinion, it should be given more exposure to the public sector so that unutilized resources can be utilized in productive manner. Apart from being active in business related activities, Pakistani youth (specifically university students) should be active in other activities such as politics, educational campaigns, in the promotion of non-profit activities and especially for the betterment of educational system in Pakistan. There should be more student funded organizations which can work for promoting quality education in Pakistan. The higher education is still not accessible to everyone in the country especially for those living in rural areas that possess lots of talent but do not have exposure.

If citizens of Pakistan claim that they are desperate with the current situation in the country, they should take on the responsibility and should start doing something from their own rather than just blaming the government. If the youth becomes active and people start realizing their own responsibilities then Pakistan will no more be stagnant. The need is to become active on their own part and utilize the wasted resources in order to see Pakistan as a developing and proud nation. 

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