KARACHI:
Pakistan proudly speaks of 'Digital Pakistan', biometric governance and technological modernisation. Yet behind these announcements lies a painful and deeply uncomfortable question: What value does digital progress hold if vulnerable citizens are still forced to prove they are alive by physically standing before a counter?
I write this not merely as a legal grievance, but as the lived reality of a 67-year-old overseas widow whose EOBI survivor pension remains suspended despite the existence of an operational digital "Proof-of-Life" verification system developed by the state itself through NADRA's Pak-ID platform.
Official correspondence from NADRA confirms that facial-recognition-based Proof-of-Life verification is already operational for other federal pension systems. Yet EOBI pensioners continue to be excluded because of institutional non-integration and bureaucratic inertia. The result is devastating.
An elderly widow residing thousands of miles away is effectively told that her existence can only be recognised if she undertakes an expensive and physically exhausting international journey merely to stand before a bank branch in Pakistan. At what point does administrative procedure become administrative cruelty?
Pakistan cannot simultaneously claim digital transformation while forcing elderly citizens into impossible physical verification requirements that technology has already rendered unnecessary, even the embassy attested proof-of-life certificates are not accepted by EOBI and the bank. The tragedy is that Pakistan has the technological capability - yet institutions refuse to align themselves with it. A modern state is not judged merely by the sophistication of its technology, but by whether that technology reaches the vulnerable, the elderly and the forgotten.
The federal government, EOBI, the State Bank of Pakistan and relevant oversight bodies must urgently intervene to ensure integration of EOBI with NADRA's digital Proof-of-Life system so that overseas pensioners are not forced into humiliation and financial distress simply to access their lawful entitlements. No widow should spend her final years begging the system to acknowledge that she is alive.
Ms Ghulam Fatima
Ontario, Canada
