Prime Minister Imran Khan launched the Digital Pakistan campaign that aims to make lives of the people easier through e-governance and eliminate corruption from the country. The capability of the PTI to make promises and falling short has been witnessed several times. The Digital Pakistan initiative by the PTI must not take a U-turn. At a ceremony to mark the Digital Pakistan initiative, PM said that after having stabilised the economy, the government would digitise the government functioning by offering proactive government services to ease out public difficulties besides bringing transparency.

He said the country could not attract foreign investment as long as the rupee was not strengthened.
“Now all our attention will be focused at the Digital Pakistan project,” PM Khan said. “It will unleash the potential of our youth.” He said the considerable population of youth in the country could be converted into the country’s strength through the Digital Pakistan project. Perhaps to ensure that they stand true to their words, the government upon the request of the Prime Minister decided to bring in an experienced technology leader, Tania Aidrus.

Her recent job was at Google as head of Payments and Next Billion Users. She joined Google in 2008 as the Country Manager, South Asia Emerging Markets. Completing her MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tania brings with her a vast experience of digital media. The economic stability is impossible to achieve without curbing corruption, as the modern world white crimes are hard to detect without the efficient use of technology. Realising the significance of information communication technology, Prime Minister Imran Khan has spearheaded a massive plan to digitise the government to fight corruption and facilitate the public, besides stepping towards open government.

However, digital technology has already made a significant headway in our society. Smartphones are being used in Pakistan to send and receive messages, access mail, hail cabs to work, send or receive money while political activists are fast learning to use them in election campaigns and for holding flash protests. E-commerce and a number of startups have made shopping and hiring of services easier. Furthering the digital steps, the PTI Imran Khan government has rightly set the course towards digital ambitions for both the government and private sectors. Under the plan, multiple initiatives have already been kicked off, while several others have been identified to be executed in the coming months.

Moreover, Prime Minister Imran Khan does not therefore need to lecture to the country about the utility of digitalisation or to claim that a digital Pakistan will unleash the full potential of youth or that the country will experience a quantum leap ahead. He just needs to be reminded that a pioneer attempt in the field was made in Punjab by former CM Shehbaz Sharif who went for the digitalisation of land records to end the Patwari culture. Mr Khan needs to probe where the experiment failed with the result that the Patwaris are more powerful than DCs even in Naya Pakistan.

Digitalisation of the scale visualised by PM Khan would pose much, much greater problems than the ones faced by the former CM of Punjab. There is a need to go beyond slogans and find answers to these problems. Pakistan has the world’s second largest youth population “which can be converted into our strength with this one initiative alone”. The problem is that the youth is mostly untrained and millions of it can neither read nor write. There is therefore a need for mega-investment in education and technical training to turn the dream into reality. With allocations for education by the PTI government in 2018-19 budgets the lowest in the region, talk about the digital vision is moonshine.