.. by Naeem Sadiq
EMAIL service has been available to the general public worldwide for about 30 years. However, even today, bureaucrats and the government of Pakistan do not communicate on email. Papers, photocopies, affidavit attestations and files managed, lost and found by ‘naib qasids’ define our governance in the year 2025. Only in June this year, over 6,000 papers were printed, photocopied, distributed, filed and mailed to various government departments to notify four Eid holidays — a task that could have been done by a single click through an email. We simply refuse to understand or learn how developed nations run their day-to-day affairs.
Consider Pakistan’s two most digitally distinguished but disconnected organisations — the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. It was recently concluded that there are over five million Sims that ought to have been blocked many years ago, because their supporting CNICs had either expired or belonged to deceased individuals. The two most high-tech organisations, located within a 10-minute walking distance of each other, cannot build an integrated system capable of automatically deactivating Sims the very day a CNIC or an individual expires.
Leaders regularly invoke slogans like ‘digital transformation’, without knowing what it means or taking any practical steps. There is little effort to identify, register or maintain even the most basic data on the number, location and details of factories, shops, wedding halls, graveyards, restaurants, mines, houses, teachers, workers, government vehicles (both present and missing), schools, pharmacies, clinics, industrial accidents, property ownership or births and deaths.
Consider how even the tiniest transaction from any of Pakistan’s 18,193 bank branches or over 2,000 TCS courier outlets, instantly triggers an SMS notification to the customer. On the other hand, we do not even know the number of graveyards in Pakistan, let alone those who are buried every day. No wonder that 80 per cent of deaths every year are neither reported nor recorded by Nadra. We forget that it is the responsibility of the state to establish a system that ensures that every birth and death is registered and recorded on the very day it occurs.
A data-less Pakistan suits only the rich.
Pakistan’s inability to implement a digital system has resulted in 20-30pc of the total salary and pension budget being lost to ghost employees, ghost pensioners and individuals drawing multiple salaries or pensions. This could have been easily prevented by allocating unique QR codes to each hospital and each graveyard and integrating them with Nadra. As soon as a hospital or graveyard confirms a birth or death, a shared national database could automatically issue a birth or death certificate — and in the case of a death, simultaneously deactivate the individual’s CNIC, Sim card, bank accounts and salary or pension.
The existing archaic union council-based birth and death certificate processes, requiring about a dozen documents and half-a-dozen visits to offices, ought to be abolished altogether. The government must itself directly monitor and record every birth and death — exactly like it is done by FIA for arriving and departing passengers. A data-less Pakistan suits the rich, but plays havoc with the lives of ordinary citizens.
Of the 53m workers of Punjab and Sindh, the monthly PESSI/SESSI (employees social security institutions) contri-bution is paid for 3pc workers only, while nationwide, just 3.28m out of 80m are covered by the Employees’ Old-Age Benefits Institution. Of the 2.26m cases pending in courts, an estimated 1.4m cases involve land/pro-perty disputes that could be easily resolved if property records were digitised and transparent. The complete absence of reliable data compounds existing misgovernance, hitting the poor the hardest.
Even a developing country like Uzbekistan sets a compelling example for Pakistan’s IT ministry and Nadra, with its single unified portal integrating 600 government departments and seamlessly offering 720 different services to its citizens. In the absence of digital public service, Pakistan’s government has become sluggish and bloated, with 75pc of government employees engaged in outdated support roles like ‘qasids’, ‘naib qasids’, UDCs, LDCs, stenos, telephone operators and drivers. Across the world, these functions are routinely carried out by managers themselves. Why not in Pakistan? Why is Pakistan so reluctant and allergic to using digital technology, data collection, federated databases and digital payments to transform itself? Why let the only door to redemption close before us?
The writer is an industrial engineer and a volunteer social activist. .. [email protected]
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