This morning while having a chat with a friend I became a little curious on the corporate entities in which our Government holds shares. After a bit of googling which proved to be all abortive, I thought our Finance Ministry’s website would be the best place to start with. So I typed the all too familiar www.finance.gov.mv on my keyboard and got in to the Ministry’s website.
On the front page are what appear to be a hodgepodge of links to some downloads. The first one entitled “2010 Budget aai behey Circular” took me to an announcement on the lease of properties owned by the Government. The second one with a title “Galolhu Bolha Dhadu 12 No.Fihaara Kuyah Dhinun” as the title says was about leasing a shop lot owned by the Government at Galolhu stadium. This is followed by an umpteen number of unsorted ad-hoc announcements on similar matters I presume are related to providing “the country with a sound macroeconomic framework that leads to sustained growth, with the use of sustainable, non-inflationary fiscal policy” – the noble ‘mission’ of Finance Ministry.
I tried the heading “affiliated institutes” which, for some strange reason known only to the webmaster, listed only MMA, Customs, DIR, BML, HDFC, TEB, PEMEB. HDFC and BML can’t possibly be the only corporate entities in which Government of Maldives has stakes. But then when I saw the last tab titled ‘PEMEB’ – an acronym that incidentally rings a bell of nostalgia of my days at MMA ;-) - I thought I finally found the information I was looking for. Alas, the link is dead!
Then I decided to try my luck with the sitemap to see if that would ease my navigation through the seemingly indomitable labyrinth. Tough luck, again. Its another dead link!
My curiosity with the dead links took me to a tab titled “Minister’s Bureau” that appear to have become extinct perhaps not too long after the last archaeopteryx flew the Earth. Then, I finally noticed the little ‘FEEDBACK’ tab on which I wrote a little note about my problem.
My search eventually took me to a PDF document entitled “Government Offices and Independent Institutions” on the website of the President’s Office. But that was of no help either.
Finally, after almost 45 minutes of googling, navigating through websites of several Government offices and writing small notes that would perhaps only be ‘read’ by BOTs, I’m still left clueless as to how many corporate entities are there in which the Government of my country holds stakes.
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4 comments:
hey I thought u are a great fan of Ali Hashim. in a previous post u were praising him so much. Arent you talking about the lousy website of his ministry here?
the truth is they dont want to make things transparent. Ali Hashim isnt the man that u think he is. Thats why Hassan Saeed's party had to take finance ministry to court.
I also wonder why every govt office needs to maintain an independent website.
Singapore for example has http://www.gov.sg/
But we have have a website for each govt office. they have their webmasters and staff to manage website. Even our embassies have thier websites. usually in other countries websites of embassies are hosted in the Foreign ministry's websites.
Just think of the duplication and wastage that is happening because of this.
ayya
Anon 6:53 - I still am a fan of Ali. Inspite ofthe Civil Service pay controversy I still believe that he is one of the best choice for that job. MoFT's website is a different issue.
Ayya 10:57 - Yes I agree. As you've said there is so much of duplication and wastage happening because of the practice of maintaining a website for each Govt office. Singapore is a good example. Another small country that's done a good job with the Govt portal is Mauritius. Check out www.gov.mu :-)
Anon 7:01 - thanks for the url. But I'm afraid I couldnt find the info I was looking for from the link u've given. I have to admit that Im not very tech-savvy ;-). I'd appreciate if you could help.
Good luck with finding any (useful/relevant) information from our government online. You could be searching forever. I am a student studying abroad and government websites are as useful as wikipedia would be as a valid reference! Furthermore, contacting the relevant government offices officially or through 'contacts' isn't necessarily any more fruitful. Could this mean that the Govt doesn't want to make such (or any) information public...or perhaps, the information just doesn't exist??
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