Digitally deprived
NOT too long ago, the US Office of Personnel Management sent an email to approximately 2.4 million federal employees, requesting them to list the five things they did last week.
Over 1m employees responded to this directive. A second email ordered an ongoing requirement for employees to submit their weekly accomplishments by 11:59pm ET each Monday.
Imagine if a similar email was sent to 2.4m government employees in Pakistan (federal as well as provincial), to list ‘the five things they did last week’. Our extensive research of email responses by Pakistani government officials reveals that less than 100 out of the 2.4m government employees will be able to send any kind of response.
The reason is simple: 99 per cent of government employees do not have an official email address and the 1pc listed addresses are either incorrect or never checked.
A country has e-governance when it uses digital technology to provide paperless services, communicate with citizens, eliminate their visits to offices, maintain records, and improve efficiency. An ordinary citizen can easily gauge the level of e-governance by the number of photocopies, affidavits, attestations, applications and the runarounds experienced. On that barometer, Pakistan may have barely achieved 5pc e-governance.
Pakistan may have barely achieved 5pc e-governance.
Why have Pakistani citizens been deprived of the digital services routinely available to the rest of the world? Although every citizen is entitled to a birth and death certificate, obtaining these documents continues to remain archaic, bureaucratic and cumbersome.
Sixty per cent of children are not registered with Nadra till the age of five while death certificates are obtained (and CNICs cancelled) for only 20pc of those who die every year. Imagine the downstream chaos caused by the misuse of CNIC cards that have not been cancelled. Does Nadra not know that in most countries, birth and death certificates can be digitally obtained within seven days — without a citizen ever having to visit any government office?
Imagine the predicament of a grief-stricken widow, who needs to make a request for ‘family pension’ after the demise of her husband. She is required to undergo a complex process of producing multiple attested copies of 13 entirely irrelevant documents. Why does it not occur to our dysfunctional bureaucracy that the entire exercise is unwarranted, as all this information is already available in Nadra’s records?
Why must every six months, some 3m pensioners undertake a totally avoidable exercise of visiting their banks to prove that they are still alive — a verification that could easily be performed by digital face recognition.
What stops Pakistan from digitising its courts and judicial processes to clear a backlog of over 2.6m pending cases that would otherwise require roughly 2,000 years to resolve? Likewise, what stops Pakistan from digitising property records, from Karachi to Kurram, to prevent multiple individuals claiming ownership of the same property at the same time?
Pakistan remains a digitally barren and data-less country. Whether it relates to child abuse, fertility rates, number of coal mines, government vehicles held, stolen or missing, child labour, industrial accidents, ghost schools, number of weapons held by civilians, or the 76m non-EOBI registered workers, our only source of data are the reports published by global organisations or foreign-funded NGOS.
It is not a coincidence that for the umpteenth time the data-less Sindh government in March 2025 announced action against 5,000 ghost schoolteachers. It is also not a coincidence that the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s 2024 audit revealed approximately 950 ghost employees with another 200 staff members drawing salaries from two agencies simultaneously using a single CNIC.
Pakistan could be digitally turned around in a very short time. Do away with the new Digital Nation Pakistan Act and its three suggested organisations. Learn from countries like Kenya whose 96pc citizens use mobile phones (M-PESA) for digital transactions (as against 20pc Pakistanis).
Learn from countries like Malaysia, that from next year, using facial recognition and IRIS, will adopt a QR code system for immigration clearance in just five seconds. Learn from India, where one could buy a cup of tea or a pound of potatoes using QR codes.
Shut down the bureaucratic IT ministry and create a two-person digital ‘Department of Government Efficiency’(DDOGE) that provides only two options to every government organisation — reduce the number of employees to half and convert to e-governance or part ways.
The writer is an industrial engineer and a volunteer social activist.
Published in Dawn, March 31st, 2025