Pakistan – Step forward, reform and compete with the rest of the world – Part 3.

Pakistan – Step forward, reform and compete

with the rest of the world – Part 3.

Circa 1425.

Mirzo Muhammad Taragai  Ulug’bek, sat gazing at the stars, from the world’s most significant observatory built near Samarkand.  Among the numerous astronomical studies of Ulug’bek, is his priceless work ‘Gurgan Ziji Jadidi’ – a famous catalogue of ‘new astronomical tables’, that provides accurate coordinates of 1018 stars.   The length of the star year was determined by Ulug’bek to be 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes, and 8 seconds, which deviates only by 58 seconds from the value valid today.

Mirzo Ulug’bek catalogued his findings on a chart (shown below), that perhaps led the path to the Excel and Access databases of today’s digital age.

Circa 2025:

Six hundred years down the road, Pakistan a 21^st century modern state, refuses to collect, record, catalogue, preserve, or provide access to any kind of even the most rudimentary data.  Government offices have become mountains of largely irrelevant papers and files that lie buried in almirahs or stacked on floors and tables. While these bundles provide huge attraction to the ‘Kabari walas’, they are no good for any purposeful research, retrieval, counting, analysis or decision making.

Consider a most simple and harmless request by a Pakistani citizen Boota Imtiaz, for data pertaining to the number of Hindu couples married and registered by the government under the Sindh Hindu Marriage Act in 2022 and 2023.  Despite numerous reminders and notices, the state has not been able to retrieve, collect and provide this information till today. A government of clerks only collects photocopies and affidavits. Data management is neither its need nor its capacity.

The process of record management at higher institutions is no different. The picture below shows how we keep the judicial files and records of cases handled in superior courts. No wonder it would take our courts another 2000 years to clear the 2.6 million pending cases.   Our reluctance to create any kind of permanent, transparent and retrievable digital database management systems is holding us back in time, hiding our misdeeds and making it impossible to improve the lives of ordinary people.

Naeem Sadiq

March 24, 2025