The cost of paper.

Imagine, starting from a single paper, the paper becoming a file, file to a cabinet, cabinet to a room and the room to a warehouse, filled to the brim and locked away in a state of decay. "What is the cost of paper?" The ever-increasing cost of real estate the government has to look forward to further increase the cost associated with the warehousing of the data. The absence of technology in the system has been a miss. A due analysis would show greater reliance on physical paper rather than digitizing the process, making old records obsolete and by law allowed to be disposed off. Another factor, the warehousing cost of paper, with paper firms raising the prices and the increasing the cost of operations of any company the incentive is far greater to move to a paperless environment. However, the government is not making such a move to discuss a pressing matter such as this. An example of the first world may be seen as calculators have been launched to calculate the environmental impact of paper usage, governments are considering such initiatives. Examples can be seen in Environmental paper network established in California providing guidelines to thousands of companies with credible data. The environmental paper company is a coalition of over a hundred not-for-profit organizations working for a shared goal that paper production and use contributes to a clean, healthy, just and sustainable future for life on earth. (https://c.environmentalpaper.org/). The factors that are considered to be a part of the calculator are as follows wood, energy, greenhouse gas, water, solid waste ecosystem, pollutants. Coming back to the rooms filled with paper as opposed to data warehousing solutions that can be traced back and maintained on the cloud. If a company in isolation chooses to think about these factors and take action on reducing the cost of paper in the company, a policy level implementation has exponential advantages at a national level. It's not that these issues are the first ones to pop up, studies on communication and the paperless environments are dime a dozen. However, governments find a way to increase spending on a short term than save cost on a long term.

Considering the associated costs that happen at a national level are a mystery on how the governments after governments can lose out on such an opportunity. Gartner, Inc. an Industry research firm estimated that as much as 3% of a company's revenue is spent on paper, printing, filing and the costs to store and maintain files of information. In addition, the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper a year. These figures come from first world countries. The cost increases exponentially where recycling is not rewarded to companies rather a sunk cost. With the recent consideration of the government on information technology, there has been a failure to point out that a paperless environment not only has benefits of reducing costs to the stakeholders involved there is a lack of consideration that the considerable increase in the productivity that is brought upon by such an initiative; take for example Estonia, a little known country that has gone paperless in all their government activities did it in 2016 being awarded the title of E-Estonia, with the help of Cybernetica a company that devised a cryptographic key card, a highly secure digital ID that allows Estonians to digitally sign documents, pay taxes and vote online, inter alia. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the possibilities are endless as technology, will add layers of productivity as well.

Right now, the government initiatives such as the Prime Minister Complaint Portal can be further evolved into not being only limited to complaints but day to day workload can be added to centralized body monitoring all portals of all companies of the government and all the governmental departments. This would not only add a layer of transparency to the process, increase the turnaround time, keep the citizen informed of the status and create an ease of interaction with the government. Coming back to Estonia having a limited population the business growth was also limited a problem that affects Pakistan as well. However, Estonia had a solution to the problem by adding an e-Residency program, which chiefly allows anyone to register a business in Estonia; from anywhere in the world. Ease of doing business is a great initiative by the government of Pakistan. SECP had smoothened its process to a great deal by including the setup of Limited Liability Companies and new reforms. However, the future of business is electronic. E-Commerce being the fastest growing business segment around the world the government can add regulations follow such successful models to further strengthen its ease of doing business model in Pakistan; this is just another merit of moving to paperless environment you can smoothen out your processes and create an ease for the investor and or the residents of the country.

The State bank of Pakistan must be lauded for their green banking guidelines doing an environmental assessment of their customers and the accounting for the risk and the environmental impact the said customers business activities and practices. The green banking guidelines also directs the banks to assess their own operations, a move to a paperless banking solution; reducing the number of paper usage which has its own problems in a country such as Pakistan. Having said that, since 2017 when the guidelines were published the front-end operations of the Banks have still not shown much of an improvement in terms of their paper usage. The guidelines can serve as a good guideline for the government as well on paper reduction if the government wishes to do so; better yet should do so.

All this has a direct correlation with the productivity of any system. A known fact that paper in any form of approval process will move slowly as compared to a digital approval process. Paper increases the risk of Lost, damaged or misplaced documents resulting in lost data, privacy violations or lost customers. Paper also requires manual entry for extrapolation in the future, this increases the risk of human error. Another factor than can be observed over the years is the loss of confidentiality in all of government documents. This as a matter of fact adds a layer of confidentiality and at the same time adds transparency to the entire process. Digital records are easier to maintain and easily available for review as and when required. More and more organizations in the first world are adopting mobile solutions and eliminating paper from the process. The advent of technology the acceptance of paper has also gone down, this directly impacts the employees of any company as it frustrates the employees with the need to fill out long, tedious forms, keeping them organized and secure, filing them correctly and retrieving them when needed. This is just the tip of the iceberg consider the cost of maintaining all that data, resulting in lost productivity, wasted space and higher operating costs.