Aim to establish system to protect data from incidents: Azim

Male’ City Mayor Adam Azim on Monday said the council’s aim is to ensure safety of data and documents even in the events of unexpected incidents and crises.

The mayor’s statement has come not longer after a fire in the green building, that houses multiple government offices burned down last Thursday leaving the entire structure inhospitable. The building houses the Ministry of Housing, the Ministry of Construction and Infrastructure, the Ministry of Environment, and an office of the City Council.

The Male’ City Council office in the green building was also among the most impacted, with documents related to Male’ area residents, birth registry and building registry being among those that were affected due to the fire.

The council staff however, are currently trying to collect and collate all the documents they were able to recover safely. The documents are being collected and sorted at Maafannu Madharusaa.

While speaking with ‘Sun’ Online, Mayor Azim said the significant damages to multiple ministries and the council’s office in the fire shows lack of ‘pro-active’ approaches. He noted the lack of digitalization efforts at the council despite the global technological evolution.

He noted documents have been manually recorded for over 20 years, but affirmed digitalization efforts.

He also noted that current top priority is the assortment of the recovered documents, which would be followed by a damage assessment to recognize the documents the council authority lost, which it would attempt to recover.

“We were mostly concerned if documents related to residences would be destroyed, but majority of those documents were saved. Next would be documents related to other vitals and mortality reports, which we are trying to recover now,” Azim said.

He assured these documents would be recovered through the Department of National Registration (DNR) and local courts.

“Our primary objective now is to set up a system that ensures safety of data and documents in the event of a similar incident in the future, which is also the top priority after I assumed my role as a mayor,” Azim added.

According to the Deputy Mayor, Ahmed Nareesh, the saved documents include Male’ area residents’ details dating back to 1950s, birth certificates, building schematics, registries and structural changes to buildings.

“We are talking about a lot of data, with a portion of them destroyed in the fire. We can only ascertain the documents we lost after we are done with assorting the saved documents after which we will begin recovery efforts,” Nareesh said.

Emphasizing the laborious task at hand, Nareesh said the council’s staff have been working diligently on recovering the documents.

Some of the employees working in the departments that were affected in the fire had shared their concerns with ‘Sun’ Online as well. According to an employee in Vital Registrations of the council, approximately 20 percent of the mid-wife documents have been lost while 80 percent of the department’s data affected including water and smoke damages to the documents.

“It has been two days since we have not been able to provide this service, which puts immense pressure on the entire department. This truly is a devastating incident, which has incapacitated us from rendering services to the public. Truth is, many [public members] are already contacting us about [the services],” the employee said.

According to the employee, the department has to attend to 40 new-born applications in Male’ area on a daily basis, with birth certificate services rendered for elderly citizens.

“Our request to the government is provide a working environment to the 50 employees of this department at the earliest convenience,” the employee added.

The ministries that lost its venue in Thursday’s fire have been relocated to Dharubaaruge on Sunday.