Digitalization Of Pakistan: All you need to know

There are 76.38 million Internet users in Pakistan and increased by 11 million (+17%) between 2019 and 2020. With the number of growing users in the country, it attracts a lot of digitally based companies towards Pakistan. With a population of 200 Million, Pakistan faces the problem of creating jobs and opportunities, but through the digitalization of the country, it can solve this problem. And now the government is already focusing a lot on digitalization, but there are some hurdles in that:

Consistency IT policy

Pakistan needs a thoroughly reviewed well planned IT policy for the long term despite the change in government. In Pakistan, the bureaucracy didn’t realize the importance of digitalization, so we need new officials who understand the importance of digital Pakistan and how digital systems work around the globe.

In recent times we saw several bans on different apps by the old-fashioned judiciary who didn’t have mastery on that subject.

Ban on Facebook, YouTube, Xbox live, Imgur, Wikipedia, Twitter, Quora, and PUBG are examples from the past that our government officials don’t know how to tackle the problems without a ban. We need an IT ministry with a new administration and an IT minister with an IT background if we want to become a robust digital nation.

Cash-less economy

In Pakistan, only 21% of people have bank accounts. Hence, there is vast potential for digital payment solutions, and we can see people already using digital solutions like Easypaisa and JazzCash around the country. In 2015 people of Pakistan made 130 million transactions by digital payment and online banking transactions.

Tax evasion and Money laundering are the biggest problems in Pakistan, and we can solve these problems by adopting digital payment solutions, and this will be a big step towards the digitalization of the country. But for making this culture accessible in-country govt. Need to reduce taxation.

Internet Coverage

Internet is a basic need for digitalization.36.18% population in Pakistan use the internet, and most of this population lives in urban areas. Fast Internet is still a big problem in Pakistan. Most of the northern regions yet don’t have even a 3G coverage while 5G is ready to take on the world.

Pakistan is developing Gwadar but until 2017 people living there can’t even enjoy 3G services and from this, you can understand the situation in the rest of Balochistan.

But the government is taking amazing steps in this direction under CPEC, Pakistan setting up a vast network of fiber optic cable in the country.

People don’t know how to search

164.9 million people use mobile phones in Pakistan, but very few people use mobile phones productively because people don’t know even how to search. Only 10% of people using cell phones in Pakistan can search on the internet as the rest of all don’t know how to search in English, and we didn’t develop any simple Urdu keyboard in the last decade for cell phones users.

In that matter, we need to learn from Iran how even after so many years international sanctions they are one the best-digitalized nations in the world.

Even after having a good growing IT industry we didn’t make a keyboard in local languages like Iran and the government need to translate English content on the Internet in Urdu.

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