The business community has important stakes in the official record of many public sector organizations including FBR, CDA, IESCO and others, the government should take measures to convert record of all public sector organizations into digital mode to ensure its safety and security in case of any fire incident or natural calamity.

This was stressed by Khalid Iqbal Malik, President, Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry in a statement.

He said the important record of government institutions was destroyed due to eruption of fire in Awami Markaz few days back and archiving record of all government institutions in digital mode would ensure its sustainable safety. It would also save all stakeholders from the troubles they have to face in case of destruction of official record.

Khalid Iqbal Malik said that many private firms were offering latest technology based archiving solutions with most sophisticated, secure, risk free and hassle free physical record management and storage facilities at 3rd party location where retrieval of record was possible by a mere click without wasting time on manual retrieval. He said that fortunately, the record of Federal Tax Ombudsman at Awami Markaz remained secure during fire incident due to keeping it in digital mode through outsourced services. He stressed that government should take benefit of these technologies and facilities for keeping its official record intact in case of fire or any other tragic incident.

Khalid Malik, Senior Vice President, Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry said that record of many public sector organizations, who were allegedly involved in embezzlement or scandals of billions of rupees was found missing in the past due to which authentic investigations could not take place and the real culprits could not be traced. Moreover, sometimes, precious official record is stolen by the vested interests which creates lot of problems.

He said that the best solution of all such problems was that all government institutions should convert manual record into digital mode and keep it at third party location so that it could remain in safe custody and could be easily retrieved whenever required.

Tahir Ayub, Vice President ICCI also stressed that government should take benefit of latest IT technologies for keeping official record intact. He further said that CDA should upgrade its firefighting system and jumping foams to cope with fire incidents effectively and to minimize the human and material losses.