Delivering Digital Pakistan

Tania Aidrus has got a big job on her hands. The opportunity to work in the public sector of the world’s fifth-most populated country is a definitely a star on her resume (as it is for Dr Hafeez Shaikh), which is exactly why people shouldn’t potty about saying ‘Oh my God! She left Google to work for Pakistan’, or that Shaikh left international career to work in Pakistan.

But hers is also a difficult job. Pakistan is no easy country to change; the shard of Pakistan’s governance isn’t easy to put back together again. Digital Pakistan Policy covers a host of components: from legislation and infrastructure development to local manufacturing and software exports. And it also hopes to enable digitisation of various socio-economics sectors: from e-agriculture and e-health to e-energy and e-commerce and cloud computing & Big Data.

If the elephant in the room is inertia, the elephant on the table is poor mechanism of coordination between the provinces, and between the centre and the federating units. The policy document doesn’t offer any insight as to how will Islamabad address this, save for the following not-so-promising statement.

The Ministry of Information Technology “will encourage provincial departments and bodies to use this Digital Pakistan Policy as a guideline for their own IT initiatives. Provinces can identify their own unique requirements and implementation frameworks. However, broad alignment to the National Digital Pakistan Policy may be pursued.”

The realities of 18^th constitutional amendment are such that the fate of Pakistan and millions of Pakistani rests with the provinces in much greater proportions than what is popularly imagined: be it health, education, police, labour, or other facets of governance – all these critical elements rest with the provinces. So would ‘e’ versions of these.

The PTI could perhaps deliver in the provinces it has under its belt. But so far it has failed to put on a good show in Punjab – Pakistan’s biggest province - or even place its A-team there. But here are two things that Tania should focus on even though the digital policy document is silent on these: taxation; and statistics.

In so far taxation is concerned, the Digital Pakistan Initiative should aim to digitise incorporation of all types and forms of legal entities (SECP-registered companies, AoPs, partnerships), their main business operations, their records and locations (GIS-mapping) and other critical information in addition to helping the FBR in the setting up and running of its much-awaited analytics wing.

These efforts should be coupled with improving the statistics. Information is life and blood of modern economy. Yet even as the government policy document talks about Big Data, the quality, depth and frequency of the country’s federal and provincial level socio-economic statistics is strikingly poor.  Tania and Asad Umar (who now oversees the statistics division as planning minister) ought to sit together to address this yawning gap – although, ideally, statistics ought to be made independent and autonomous body, for more on which read BR Research’s ‘Free the statistics (division)’ published May 2, 2019.