My six years with the government

When I joined the government of Punjab over six years ago, in my sabbatical year from LUMS, I did not know what to expect. Almost everyone I knew discouraged me from working for the government. Six years later, I am happy to report that the last few years have been the most productive years of my career. The Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) completed over 300 projects in this time, and fundamentally transformed many government departments and processes.

Punjab has totally computerised its land revenue system (aka notorious Patwari system), where land record of over 54 million rural landowners has been digitised. This new computerised system has been used to issue over 8.2 million fards and perform over 4.5 million property transactions.

Likewise, all 713 police stations in Punjab have been totally computerised, including all previous criminal biometric record. Over 2.1 million computerised FIRs have been registered using this system. We have replicated the system in Sindh and last week, the Punjab and Sindh Police started integrating their system to better coordinate their activities across provincial boundaries. Similarly, we also replicated our investigation system for the K-P Police’s counter-terrorism department at their request.



A comprehensive case-flow management system has been installed at the Lahore High Court to ensure that cases can be tracked, scheduled and monitored throughout an automated system. Over 150,000 cases are now being processed using our automated case-flow management system.

A large number of property disputes arise from fake and back-dated stamp papers. Pakistan’s 117-year-old arcane stamp paper system also causes significant pilferage in stamp duty due to undervalued property transactions. To eliminate this, we have replaced all (high denomination non-judicial, and all judicial) stamp papers with e-stamps. Citizens can now buy e-stamps with a uniquely traceable verification number from a private bank, starting with Punjab Bank. Over Rs75 billion e-stamps have been issued throughout the province and a pilferage of over Rs10 billion annually has been eliminated.

Pakistan’s public-sector school education system is plagued by ghost schools, teacher absenteeism, bogus student enrolment and poor quality of education. We developed an extensive school monitoring system in Punjab, where monitoring officers carry out random inspections of each school every month using our application on computer tablets. The uploaded inspection reports are geo-tagged and include pictures of the attendance register and school headmaster. To date, over 2 million inspections have been carried out and ghost schools have been entirely eliminated. All this data is made publicly available in real-time at http://open.punjab.gov.pk. We also digitised all the textbooks in Punjab from grade 6-12. This content is freely available at http://elearn.punjab.gov.pk and is being rolled out in over 1,000 middle schools in Punjab.

When Punjab was hit by a dengue pandemic, we developed a smartphone-based tracking and early epidemic warning system which helped it successfully avoid another epidemic. Extending this work, we developed a smartphone-based system to track vaccinators in Punjab. Our system, called eVaccs, drastically increased geographic coverage of vaccination from 18% to 88% in less than two years. DPT3 coverage also increased from 54% to 97%. We have replicated the system in K-P and Balochistan at their request, with equally encouraging results.

In our projects with the health department, we have specifically focused on Primary and Secondary health facilities. Every DHQ, THQ, RHC and BHU in Punjab now has biometric attendance devices which are used daily by over 70,000 medical staff. This has improved attendance from 53% to 87% in two years.

Likewise, to ensure availability of medicine in these facilities, procurement of medicine is done through a centralised automated system, which was used to procure over Rs13.5 billion medicines this year. Now purchase orders can be issued automatically as soon as medicine stocks fall below a certain level. The Drug Testing Labs (DTL) have also been automated so that it’s impossible to track or influence the results of a drug test, cutting out the main reason for substandard medicines.

In Punjab, almost all commonly used citizen services such as domicile, birth certificate and vehicle token tax are digitised. However, citizens still have to visit government offices and often wait in queues to receive a service. Therefore, we started establishing e-Khidmat centres across Punjab. These centres offer close to 20 government services under one roof with a guaranteed turnaround time. To date, these centres have served over 1.8 million citizens.



In my six years at PITB, the projects perhaps closest to my heart were aimed at supporting tech entrepreneurship for the youth of Pakistan. One of my first projects was to establish the Plan9 startup incubator at Arfa Technology Park. Over 160 startups have graduated from Plan9. Collectively, these companies — such as Patari, Mangobaaz, Markhor, Xgear — are worth several billion rupees and have created over 1,200 jobs. We are also establishing a network of 40 e-rozgaar centres throughout Punjab to train university students to monetise their education from online freelancing. In the last 10 months, the programme has trained over 4,000 students who have earned over $150,000.

Besides large initiatives, PITB undertook hundreds of small reforms to help citizens and the government. From our extensive platform for coordination of rescue and relief activities during floods season and inspections of medical stores, to free Wifi hotspots in six districts and subsidy to farmers using mobile wallets — Punjab is a largely digitised affair.

What I started hesitantly six years ago has turned out to be the most fruitful time of my career.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 30^th, 2018.

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