KARACHI: ‘Pakistan Citizen’s Portal’ (PCP) works under National IT Board government of Pakistan, nation-wide grievance management platform initially launched as government-owned mobile application for citizens through which they can lodge their complaints with government. Prime Minister Imran Khan launched it in October 2018. It operated under Prime Minister’s Performance Delivery Unit (PMDU). Pakistan Citizen’s Portal launched its web-based services and helpline in September 2020. In October 2020, manual complaint lodging facility was provided at dashboards of government offices for illiterate and physically challenged people.

But what actually happened? Most of technical deficiencies still stand. App was built just to fool public by corrupt bureaucracy as there’s only one way to follow up on complaint and that is to submit another complaint. There’s no way for citizens to change complaint status once it’s wrongfully marked as resolved by administration and that is just start. Interface is designed in such way that no layman can create sizeable complaint with all necessary documents attached unless they take help from technical person. Complaint description field is stupidly crammed in center so that entering a large query becomes pain and app’s screen jumps below at end of page as you type. Complaint address/ location field doesn’t work at all. File upload is not easy to use and doesn’t integrate with popular cloud services like Google drive so you have to download every document from there manually and then there’s no way to select multiple files at time. Hence, according to public users all in all it is just another gimmick to fool public and Prime Minister.

A user on October 28, 2018 commented that idea of creating such an app is indeed ingenious however it suffers heavily from “Application programming errors”. “I had to try more than dozen times before I could register and log in! Team especially Android developers are requested to fix “Something went wrong, try again” error, as soon as possible because thousands of people are trying to install and operate app, but couldn’t. (Kudos to minds behind this great idea), hope to see Application up and running without these software glitches soon.”

Sufian Naeem (Sufi) another user stated on August 6, 2021, “I am unable to attach call recording. There is no mention of formats that are supported by app and those that aren’t. I’m using an mp3 file. Kindly let me know of formats compatible for uploading. It has been more than two years, pity that they have never been able to fully make it work. Now, right after app launches, pop up error appears and you cannot proceed further. I wonder if feature to stay anonymous even keeps your identity hidden!” Similarly Anique Waseem said on February 26, 2021, “An extremely slow app. And if you press back to correct something, everything vanishes. Attaching a document is yet another uphill task. If you succeed in attaching it, submit won’t work. So many pictures of developers in app, which is appreciable but please do something about its speed and make it user friendly. It took me more than an hour to submit complaint. Saving drafts should be an option.”

Published in The Daily National Courier, July, 18 2023

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