E-Governance in Pakistan: Why Every Relaunch Fails, and What Would Actually Work Pakistan ranks 136th out of 193 countries on the UN's E-Government Development Index, second-last in South Asia ahead of only Afghanistan, and the flagship Citizen's Portal has spent months at a time simply not working — not because the country lacks digital talent, but because every relaunch tries to fix an app instead of the fragmented institutions behind it.

Abstract

For two months in 2025, Pakistan's Citizen's Portal — the flagship app through which citizens are supposed to lodge complaints directly with government departments — simply did not work. Users opened it to a "system under necessary maintenance" message that never resolved; the helpline confirmed the outage but offered no timeline. It was not the app's first relaunch and would not be its last. The pattern is now familiar enough to be a genre of its own in Pakistani digital governance: a portal launches with a press conference, works reasonably well for a period, degrades, and is eventually relaunched — sometimes under a new name, sometimes under the same one — with the underlying causes of the previous failure left largely untouched.