ASPHYXIATED by three excruciating liabilities — the Rs83 trillion debt we must repay, galloping population numbers we must accommodate and a colonial bureaucracy we must suffer, Pakistan ought to have had its ‘I can’t breathe’ moment a long time ago. Yet, there are no signs of urgency or even of understanding what is wrong and how to take the first step on the proverbial 4,000-mile journey.

Begin by eating the elephant, one bite at a time. Follow the Eliminate, Reduce, Combine and Automate approach. This article aims to describe a practical example of how this process improvement approach could be applied to merge two huge bureaucratic mountains — the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) and the Employees Old-age Benefits Institution (EOBI) into a single lean and efficient institution. The same methodology could then be replicated for hundreds of other departments with dormant, wasteful or overlapping functions.

The BISP has a single core function: distribute over Rs800 billion to the needy each year, a task that could be electronically performed by a handful of IT professionals. Instead, it is performed by 2,356 individuals that include a federal secretary, 550 directors-general (DGs), directors and assistant........

© Dawn