News Desk
ISLAMABAD — Picture this: an email lands in the inboxes of Pakistan’s million government employees, federal and provincial alike, asking them to list five tasks they completed last week. In the United States, a similar request from the Office of Personnel Management drew over a million responses from federal workers. In Pakistan, the outcome would be starkly different. Fewer than 100 would reply. Not out of defiance, but incapacity. A staggering 99 percent of these employees lack official email addresses—or if they have them, the addresses are defunct, unchecked, or simply wrong.
This is not a glitch. It’s a symptom of a deeper malaise. Pakistan, a nation of 240 million, languishes in a digital wasteland, where e-governance—the use of technology to streamline services, cut red tape, and connect with citizens—barely registers. On a generous day, analysts peg its progress at 5 percent. The evidence is in the photocopies, the affidavits, the endless queues. For the average Pakistani, interacting with the state remains a Kafkaesque ordeal, unchanged for decades.
Take the basics: birth and death certificates. Sixty percent of children aren’t registered with the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) by age five. Only 20 percent of deaths trigger a certificate or a canceled ID card, leaving millions of ghost identities ripe for abuse. In most modern nations, these documents arrive digitally within days, no office visit required. In Pakistan, a widow seeking a pension must haul 13 redundant, attested papers to a bureaucrat’s desk—data NADRA already holds but refuses to leverage.
The dysfunction compounds. Every six months, 3 million pensioners trudge to banks to prove they’re alive, a ritual that facial recognition could render obsolete. Courts drown under 2.6 million pending cases—a backlog that, at current pace, would take two millennia to clear—while judicial digitization stalls. Property records, from Karachi to Kurram, remain a paper mess, fueling ownership disputes. Data on child labor, industrial accidents, or ghost schools? Nonexistent, unless a foreign NGO steps in.
Pakistan’s rulers seem oblivious—or indifferent. The Sindh government’s March 2025 pledge to purge 5,000 ghost teachers echoes a tired refrain, unbacked by systems to track them. A 2024 audit of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation uncovered 950 phantom workers and 200 double-dippers, all enabled by a lack of digital oversight. This isn’t mere inefficiency; it’s a failure of will, a bureaucracy clinging to opacity as if it were a lifeline.
Solutions exist. Kenya, where 96 percent of citizens use mobile payments via M-PESA, offers a model—Pakistan’s rate is a paltry 20 percent. Malaysia’s QR-code immigration clearance, set for 2026, shaves entry to five seconds with biometrics. India’s street vendors accept digital payments for tea. Yet Pakistan’s response is the bloated Digital Nation Pakistan Act, proposing three new agencies when a lean, ruthless push for efficiency could suffice. A two-person “Department of Government Efficiency” with a mandate—slash staff, go digital, or dissolve—could jolt the system awake.
Instead, Pakistan stumbles on, data-less and disconnected. Its citizens, entitled to modern governance, get a relic of the past. The tools to change are there. The resolve is not.
