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Electronic government or e-Govt as it’s more commonly referred to is still a distant dream in Pakistan. While we have seen an immense growth in the e-governance in the developed countries and many developing countries too, Pakistan is left behind in this race.I would narrate two personal experiences here to solidify my claim. National Savings is a big financial institution of Pakistan under the control of the federal government. The organization has millions of depositors and thousands of employees. If you happen to visit any National Savings center the first thing you would notice is a long queue of customers and a general sense of clutter and mayhem. This is because the organization has not yet computerized its procedures and still employs the age old system of keeping registers or ‘Khatas’ as they are known in Urdu. Now that is a very lengthy procedure of going through the piles of decades old registers and finding the details and takes a lot of time. These centers have got computers? Yes they have but they are not using them because there is no database of customers and they are placed to just give the place a techy look.Now let’s move to our very own district courts or Kutcheries. Everyone has to visit these places for a variety of reasons and they are still using centuries old system of ‘data warehousing’. The record offices often times catch fire and the precious data is lost.The plan for incorporating e-Govt modules in Pakistan was envisaged in 2002 and an Electronic Government Directorate (EGD) was established in October 2002. The directorate, working under the ministry of information technology, is carrying out some projects on a smaller scale. As mentioned earlier, computers have been provided to many government organizations but the employees either don’t know how to use them or can’t utilize them fully due to their limited scope in their jobs.Now instead of lambasting the government for the slow paced modernization, we can improve the situation. We have to start with those organizations where there is an ample IT infrastructure present but there is a dearth of procedures like National Savings. If these organizations involve the IT firms in creating databases and softwares then we can expect some positive changes.As far as digitizing the data of local governments and record offices is concerned, it’s a long and tedious project but we have to start it immediately.The only hindrance in this regard is the lack of availability of funds and more importantly, lack of will. The rampant corruption present in the traditional data keeping is also a major bottleneck as the folks will have to part with huge chunks of ‘extra income’. India is facing the similar issues but they are trying to combat it. We just need to follow suit.