Not long ago, the United States personnel management office sent an email to approximately 2.4 million federal employees, requesting them to list the five things they did last week.
More than 1 million employees responded to this directive. A second email ordered a continuous requirement for employees to send their weekly achievements at 11:59 pm et every Monday.
Imagine if an email similar to 2.4 million government employees in Pakistan (both federal and provincial), to list “the five things they did last week” will be sent. Our extensive investigation of email by email from Pakistani government officials reveals that less than 100 of the 2.4 million government employees will be able to send any type of response. The reason is simple: 99 percent of government employees do not have an official email address and the addresses that quote in the 1PC are incorrect or never verify.
A country has electronic government when using digital technology to provide paperless services, communicate with citizens, eliminate their visits to offices, keep records and improve efficiency. An ordinary citizen can easily measure the level of electronic government by the number of photocopies, affidavits, certifications, requests and the experienced mergers. In that barometer, Pakistan may have barely achieved electronic government of 5 percent.
Pakistan may hardly have achieved the electronic government of 5 percent.
Why have Pakistani citizens been deprived of digital services available routinely for the rest of the world? Although each citizen has the right to a birth and death certificate, obtaining these documents continues to be archaic, bureaucratic and cumbersome.
Sixty percent of children are not registered in Nadra until the age of five, while death certificates are obtained (and CNICs are canceled) for only 20 percent of those who die each year. Imagine downstream chaos caused by the misuse of CNIC cards that have not been canceled. Doesn’t Nadra know that in most countries, birth and death certificates can be obtained digitally in seven days, without a citizen having to visit any government office?
Imagine the situation of a widow affected by the pain, who needs to make a request for ‘family pension’ after the disappearance of her husband. You are required to undergo a complex process of producing multiple copies witnessed from 13 completely irrelevant documents. Why don’t you occur to our dysfunctional bureaucracy that all exercise is not justified, since all this information is already available in Nadra’s records?
Why should some 3M pensioners undertake a totally avoidable exercise to visit their banks to demonstrate that they are still alive, a verification that could be easily done by recognition of the digital face? What prevents Pakistan from digitating your courts and judicial processes to eliminate an accumulation of more than 2.6 million pending cases that would otherwise require approximately 2,000 years to resolve to resolve? Similarly, what prevents Pakistan from digitating property records, from Karachi to Kurram, to prevent multiple people claiming the property of the same property at the same time?
Pakistan remains a digitally arid country without data. Whether they relate to child abuse, fertility rates, the number of coal mines, retained government vehicles, stolen or missing, child labor, industrial accidents, ghost schools, number of weapons in the hands of civilians or the 76 million registered workers not EOBI, our only data source is the reports published by global or NGO organizations financed abroad.
It is not a coincidence that for the umpteenth time the government of Sindh without data in March 2025 will announce an action against 5,000 ghost school teachers. Nor is it a coincidence that the 2024 audit of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation will reveal approximately 950 ghost employees with 200 other personnel members who extract salaries from two agencies simultaneously using a single CNIC.
Pakistan could be turned digitally in a very short time. Libera with the new Pakistan Law of the Digital Nation and its three suggested organizations. Learn from countries such as Kenya whose 96pc citizens use mobile phones (M-PSA) for digital transactions (compared to 20PC Pakistani).
Learn from countries like Malaysia, which next year, using facial recognition and IRIS, will adopt a QR code system for immigration authorization in just five seconds. Learn from India, where one could buy a cup of tea or a pound of potatoes with QR codes. Turn off the Bureaucratic IT Ministry and create a ‘Digital Government Department of two people (DDOGE) that provides only two options to each government organization: reduce the number of employees in half and become electronic or formal government or form.
The writer is an industrial engineer and voluntary social activist.
naeemsadiq@gmail.com
Posted in Dawn, March 31, 2025
