A frozen era of backwardness and corruption

Dear Honourable PM,

Progress requires a detox from perpetual pessimism and learned helplessness. Unwillingness to change has pushed Pakistan into a frozen era of backwardness and corruption. On 14 April 2025, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Sindh Assembly disclosed massive financial irregularities of Rs667 million, in the audit of just one department — the Karachi Development Authority (KDA).

It revealed that Rs667 million or 30% of KDA's total pension fund of Rs2.21 billion was fraudulently received by some 500 bogus pensioners. Taking the liberty of applying the same ratio (30% illicit pension syphoning per department), can we not safely conclude that approximately Rs300 billion of our total pension budget of Rs1 trillion is being fraudulently depleted by ghost pensioners every year.

NADRA is indeed a wonderful organisation. But what good is it to the ordinary citizens if they still need to follow a century-old photocopy and affidavit driven bureaucratic processes for routine services like birth and death certificates.

Some 60% of children do not obtain NADRA birth registration (CRC), till they reach the age of five. Likewise, the processes of obtaining death certificates (and CNIC cancellation) are so complex that they result in NADRA making only 20% death certificates of those who actually die each year.

Imagine the downstream chaos caused by the misuse of uncancelled CNIC cards — not to mention the ghost pensioners stealing Rs300 billion from the state exchequer every year.

Can we not learn how another developing country, not too far from our borders, creates its birth and death certificates? Uzbekistan does not require its citizens to visit any office or submit any photocopies.

All medical institutions are linked with the Civil Registry (equivalent of NADRA) and authorised to handle birth registrations directly. Upon the birth of a child, the hospital issues a birth registration certificate featuring a QR code. This digital certificate serves the same legal purpose as the original (NADRA equivalent) birth certificate, called CRC in Pakistan.

Likewise, every medical institution/graveyard automatically notifies the Civil Registry of each death. The Registry registers the death, automatically cancels the ID card and informs the pension department to cease pension payments. Within 3 days of the death, the medical institution provides the family with two copies of the death certificate, each featuring a QR code that confirms its official authenticity. All this is done without resorting to photocopies and runarounds of government offices.

Pakistan's large-scale misappropriation of an equally gigantic pension budget reflects a refusal to reform our existing processes and their controls. Clearly the most inconvenient six-monthly bio-verification visits to banks or the meaningless grade 17 certificates have proven to be utterly ineffective.

We must immediately institute the mechanism of automatic creation of death certificates and caseation of pension, as described in the above paragraph. Linkages need to be created for sharing live data between hospitals, graveyards, pension departments and NADRA. The mechanism of 'proof of life' ought to be switched from thumb impressions to 'facial recognition', a facility now widely available in most mobile phones.

Mr Prime Minister, as someone whose sole interest is reform and improvement of processes for the ordinary citizens of Pakistan, may I urge upon you to kindly focus on eliminating all paperwork and digitising all service delivery processes.

Your efforts at building highways to shrink distances are praiseworthy. But must we not first build digital highways to shrink the misery and corruption built into our archaic photocopy driven processes.

Pakistan is in utter need of simplifying the lives of its ordinary citizens by eliminating ghost teachers, ghost schools, ghost employees and, above all, ghost pensioners. Pakistan must become a 'nation beyond bureaucrats'. It begs and beseeches a digital revolution.