Prime Minister (PM) Shehbaz Sharif on Monday refused to inaugurate a dashboard built to monitor flood relief assistance, pointing out that it lacked real-time updates and was not of international standards.
Visibly frustrated after finding inadequacies in the dashboard, the Prime Minister said, “If real-time information doesn’t arrive on this then it’s of no use. Then we are wasting each other’s time. I’m not going to inaugurate this today.”
Terming the dashboard a “joke”, he asked for it to be trashed. “I’m not negating your effort but this is not the dashboard we all imagined. This is a stationary thing in which you fill in figures,” he opined.
Federal Minister Ahsan Iqbal told the Premier that information on the portal could not be displayed in real-time because it was dependent on information from the provincial disaster management authorities.
However, the premier cut the minister midway, “But sir […] you will find out who is providing the information and who is not […] at best, this can be called a static dashboard.”
“But still, dashboards are a work in progress […],” Iqbal replied, trying once again to placate the prime minister. “They have developed a tool in a short time but as we go on more data will be uploaded,” Ahsan Iqbal stressed.
“This (flood dashboard) is not something the nation or I want. It lacks in many ways [and] it is deficient to our requirement,” the prime minister insisted as he reprimanded the officials concerned.
Shehbaz told the two federal ministers to take all the help they needed but develop a “world class” dashboard, adding that it would aid the government for decades to come, while any “makeshift” work would be of no benefit.
