Digitally deprived

Digitally deprived

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management recently sent an email to approximately 2.4 million federal employees, requesting them to list the five things they did last week. Over 1 million employees responded to this directive. A second email ordered an on-going requirement for employees to submit their weekly accomplishments by 11:59 p.m. ET each Monday. 

Imagine if a similar email was sent to 2.4 million government employees in Pakistan (Federal as well as provincial), to list ‘the 5 things they did last week’.  Our extensive research of email responses by Pakistani government officials reveals that less than 100 out of the 2.4 million government employees will be able to send any kind of response. The reason is simple. Ninety nine percent government employees do not have an official email address and the 1% 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 5% 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.  60 percent of children do not register with NADRA till the age of five while death certificates are obtained (and CNICs cancelled) for only 20 percent of those who die every year. Imagine the downstream chaos caused by the misuse of uncancelled CNIC cards.   Does NADRA not know that in most countries, birth and death certificates can be digitally obtained within 7 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 3 million 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 digitizing its courts and judicial processes to clear a backlog of over 2.6 million pending cases that would otherwise require roughly 2000 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 76million non-EOBI registered workers,  our only source of data are the reports published by global organisations or the foreign funded NGOS.  It is not a coincidence that for the nth time the data-less Sindh Government in March 2025 announced action against 5000 ghost schoolteachers.  It is also not a coincidence that the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s 2024 audit revealed approximately 950 ghost employees while 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 3 suggested organisations. Learn from countries like Kenya whose 96% citizens use mobile phones (M-Paisa) for digital transactions (as against 20% 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 2-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.

naeem sadiq