Muhammad Awais
Outside a NADRA office in rural Punjab, a seventy-year-old widow stands with a plastic bag of papers pressed to her chest. She has travelled two hours by bus to renew the identity card that keeps her pension alive. A guard tells her the process has “gone online”. She owns no phone. She has never sent a text message. For her, online is not a place. It is a wall.
Charles Dickens could have been writing about today’s Pakistan when he opened A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” For the connected citizen, the state has never been closer. Passports are renewed from a sofa. Bills vanish with a tap. For millions with no smartphone, the same state has quietly moved out of reach.
Every new portal is announced as a triumph. Queues shrink in cities, and the paperless office is applauded. Nobody photographs the woman who turned back.
Digitisation was supposed to bring government to the people. For daily-wage labourers, the elderly, adults who cannot read, and women whose families control the household phone, it can do the opposite. Services that once required a body and a thumbprint now sit behind screens, passwords and internet packages.
Should a citizen’s access to the state depend on owning a smartphone, understanding an app and maintaining a data connection? If so, citizenship in Pakistan is no longer a birthright. It is a subscription.
Consider the OTP, the “one-time password”: a short code sent by text message to prove identity. Six digits, a small thing. Also a gate. No phone means no code. No code can mean no online form or access to essential services. The circle closes, and the poor stand outside it.
Then there is the fingerprint. Brick-kiln workers, farmhands and washerwomen spend decades wearing their hands smooth. When biometric scanners refuse to recognise them, pensions or welfare payments can be disrupted. An expired CNIC can similarly shut citizens out of essential services. In a digitised republic, a database error is not merely a glitch. It can become a suspension of citizenship.
Where the state withdraws, the market moves in. Outside NADRA centres, passport offices and banks, a fringe economy has taken root: agents, photocopy stalls and mobile-load shops that will “do it online for you”. Three hundred rupees to fill a form. Five hundred near a deadline. More if you look desperate.
This is a private tax on a public right, paid by citizens least able to afford it. Money is only half the cost. A stranger may now hold your CNIC number, photograph and personal details, often stored casually on a phone. The poor are not merely overcharged. They are exposed.
The state saved paper. The citizen bought a new tax.
The divide is also about gender. Many Pakistani women borrow a husband’s or brother’s handset, meaning the code for “her” account arrives in his pocket. Mobile wallets celebrated as financial inclusion require access to phones and SIMs, while cost, custom and limited schooling can stand in the way. We cannot claim to bring women into the economy while building systems their circumstances prevent them from using.
None of this is an argument against technology. It is an argument against abandonment. A portal that only the privileged can open is not development. It is unfreedom with a login screen.
The remedy is straightforward. Every digital service must retain a physical twin: staffed counters where trained officials help citizens complete online processes free of charge. Digital services should accommodate Pakistan’s major languages. Paper routes must remain valid without penalty. Offices must remain accessible to people with disabilities. When a machine rejects a thumbprint or misspells a name, a human being with real authority must be available to fix it.
Hybrid systems are not nostalgia. They are a human-rights obligation. Pakistan’s digital leap must not be judged by the speed of its servers but by the reach of its hand.
The widow outside the NADRA office is not asking her country to slow down. She is asking it to turn around and see her. A state that cannot be reached is, for her, a state that does not exist. No Pakistani should need a phone to be a citizen.
Long Live Pakistan!
The writer is an engineer. He can be reached at: [email protected]
