A Database is Born: NADRA in the Early Days

Azhar Nawaz walks us through challenges overcome and the impact NADRA has had!

Technology is only as good as the people it empowers and the benefit it brings. The success of an application, software, project or initiative cannot be measured in how much money was spent or how many companies it awarded contracts to, rather it has to be a long term assessment of the gaps it filled and the needs it fulfilled. If it turns into a platform which would impact the lives of millions, then the value it brings is definitely greater than the worth of the project itself.

Perhaps the inherent challenge that technology faces around the world is when it is viewed in isolation. A box or a system that has a specific purpose. When it comes to viewing e-Governance, if e-enabling projects were viewed in the same manner, they would fail quite miserably. But if you learned to look long term, and saw the kind of impact that the project had on transparency and accountability, not only is the project deemed a success, but the initiatives that it will further enable, will also be a probable and significant contribution to the uplifting of an economy. And yes, government projects which are deployed at the mass scale take a tremendous amount of time because of the sheer numbers they need to reach out to.

The National Database and Registration Authority or NADRA was created to address a need -- the need to know what the composition of the citizen is. Who is out there, and how they are legally registered to use their right to interact with official authorities of a country.

National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA):The National Database Organization (NDO) was established under the Ministry of Interior as a sister organization to undertake the task of handling the data being collected through National Data Forms during the Population Census in 1998. The National Data Forms (NDFs) were designed by a committee of experts encompassing maximum social and fiscal indicators as implements for future planning, documentation of the economy, and for creation of a comprehensive Citizens' Database. To cater to a cohesive and unified approach in both registration and social fields, NADRA was formed on 10th March 2000 by merging the National Database Organization (NDO) and the Directorate General of Registration (DGR). It is an independent corporate body with requisite autonomy.

NADRA was formed to aid the government in developing and implementing a fact-based system of good governance in the country to encounter undocumented population growth and register items belonging to its citizens and organizations. This data would prove to be a critical factor in everything from city planning and addressing the population explosion, to better and more effective allocation of resources for densely populated geographical areas.

It was established with the objective of evolving a new, improved, and modernized system of registration for the citizens of Pakistan, to undertake the collection of demographic and geographic data. Initially, the main objective was the issuance of state-of-the-art National Identity Cards (NICs) to all eligible citizens of Pakistan. These NICs were backed by a computerized database and a data warehouse respectively called the Citizens' Database and National Data Warehouse (NDW). This comprehensive Citizens' Database was completed at the dawn of the new millennium and is regularly updated based on the National Data Forms.