Young, extraordinary and Pakistani

We need to extraordinary highlight young Pakistanis to counter the ‘Pakistan’s future is a hopeless case’ narrative

Asim Fayaz only wants to do things others haven’t done before. At the ripe old age of 22, Asim started consulting for the World Bank and played a key role to enable millions of Pakistani citizens to give feedback on the government’s service delivery on things like emergency medical services, property transfer and police related transactions. The award winning citizen feedback model was the brain child of Zubair Bhatti, a senior ex-civil servant, who wanted to create a mechanism which allowed Pakistani citizens to provide direct feedback to senior officials in the government via SMS/call back models so that service delivery could be improved and improper practices could be detected. Asim played an instrumental role in setting up this system, which has enabled the government to receive feedback on over four million interactions from citizens in Punjab and improved service delivery. Other provinces in Pakistan and other countries have since begun replicating this model. For most people, this would be the defining achievement of their life. But for Asim, this is was just the beginning.

As founding director of the Lahore-based Technology for People Initiative (TPI), Asim spearheaded a particularly audacious project that could prove to be a game-changer for the future of policing in Pakistan. The big idea is to map via GPS all the crime taking place in a particular district or city. Asim explains that currently, the police in Pakistan do regular patrolling on the streets and attempt to cover as much ground as they can on their patrols. However, if crime ‘hot spots’ can be mapped via GPS, the police can focus on increasing their patrols in those hot spots, thereby raising the effectiveness of their patrols. As part of TPI’s crime mapping solution, which has now been scaled up by the government to all 82 police stations in Lahore, a police officer now goes to the scene of crime with a smartphone after an FIR is registered and enters data on the location. This data helps identify crime hot spots like, say, the parking lots of hospitals and shopping markets, which then enable the police to make smarter patrolling choices.

After graduating from LUMS, Asim didn’t want to settle for the classic nine to five routine. Instead, he wanted to do projects that excited him. One of those projects was bringing TEDx to Pakistan for the first time on a large scale. While at LUMS, Asim arranged a small scale TEDx event at the cost of 60 dollars but was hungry to replicate this at a much larger scale in Lahore. However, global TED policies wouldn’t allow Asim to host a large scale TEDx event unless he had attended a global TED event. So Asim used his influencing skills to secure a free ticket to a global TED event hosted in India (usually the ticket costs thousands of dollars) and came back to Lahore to lead a group of volunteers in 2010 organising TEDxLahore, the first large scale TEDx event in Pakistan which has, since then, inspired several more TEDx events in the country.

Asim has led several other fascinating, impactful projects, too, but the length of this article doesn’t permit us to go into the details of all of them. I asked him how he’s changed as a result of working on all these projects. “The most striking shift over the years is how I perceive the government,” Asim shares. He argues that most of us view the government as a monolith, where officials are corrupt and don’t want to help or get things done. But as Asim works more closely with the government on some of these projects, the more he realises how much pressure the government is under and yet there are officials who want to do the right thing and learn how technology can help them. “There is a black hole when it comes to understanding how our government works,” he says. “There are lots of honest people in our government, too, and they need our help.”

There is a common critique whenever I interview someone young for this extraordinary Pakistanis series. The argument is that these young people haven’t done enough to qualify as extraordinary. I disagree. No one has monopoly on being extraordinary. We need to highlight young Pakistanis who are doing extraordinary things to counter the ‘Pakistan’s future is a hopeless case’ narrative being peddled by the media. On that note, Asim is currently pursuing his Masters of Development Practice at UC Berkeley and will turn 27 later this year. I hope Pakistan’s future will be as bright as his.

Note: The purpose of this article is to find and share inspirational stories about everyday Pakistani heroes (if you know someone who should be profiled, send us a tweet @Mbilallakhani). If we don’t share these stories about Pakistan, no one else will.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 23^rd,  2015.

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