According to the 2017 national population census, 64% of Pakistan’s population lives in rural areas. While this number has admittedly been in persistent decline, with the rural population having fallen from approximately 80% of the total population in 1960, it still leaves us with a whopping 140 million people living in areas ‘administratively defined’ as rural.
In our imaginations villages and the countryside invoke bucolic scenes of golden wheat, fattened livestock and picturesque mud houses shaded by sprawling Ficus religiosa (Pipal) trees.
However, a walk through many a village is a stark reminder of the sustained and multi-faceted neglect these communities continue to live with, not the least of which is their digital exclusion.
In March 2024 the Ministry of IT and Telecom (MoITT) reported that Pakistan has an alarmingly low fiber-teledensity at 0.45% with only 9-11% of cellular towers connected via optical fiber cable (OFC); the international benchmark is 40%. In comparison, fiber optic penetration rates for Vietnam and Malaysia are 44.5% and 32.1%, respectively.
This raises the question: what of Pakistan’s much-touted mobile phone density. Latest reported stats by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) put mobile density at nearly 75% and 193 million mobile cellular subscribers as of June 2024.
However, a look at Lyon-based nPerf’s maps of 3G/4G/5G coverage by telecom service providers (Telenor, Jazz, Zong and Ufone) shows only a smattering of data points across the map of Pakistan.
These data points aggregate in the primary cities (Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar and Quetta -KLIPQ) and follow the Indus down country; much else shows up barren.
Jazz sports the only contiguous service line down the length of the Indus, with short tentacles spreading out into northern and central Punjab and at a couple of nodes from the Indus in Sindh. For the rest, service lines are a series of now-appearing and now-disappearing dashes.
In addition, the map shows Ufone presence along most of the coastline between Karachi and Gwadar. Zong’s presence is relatively stronger in Southern Punjab (Multan, Bahawalpur, Rahimyar Khan) and GB.
Telenor, surprisingly, has only sparsely distributed data points south of Bahawalpur, with its 3G/4G services largely concentrated in northern and central Punjab, and some in KP. What is especially dismaying though, is the comparisons nPerf offers with other countries, many of which show the plotted data for the largest service provider taking on the full-blooded shape of the country.
India’s map especially, shows up in deep purple, the hue for 5G, spread across the length and breadth of the country as a fabric.
Much of Pakistan also has a limited footprint in terms of fixed broadband services, which even differs within cities depending on the socioeconomic profile of a locality.
Add to this the disposable income needed to procure and use computers and smartphones (access to desktop computers, laptops, and tablets has a low national average of 11.75%), the regressive taxation practices of the government [GSMA: “Pakistan is one of the highest taxed telecom markets globally”, with users paying 34.5% in WHT and GST], the significant gender gap in mobile phone ownership (in a survey by UNDP 83.5% of women reported that their spouse or parents dictates their phone ownership), and utilization below the potential offered by a country the size of Pakistan (only 27.2 % of respondents reported ever using online shopping platforms).
Internet disruptions: some Pakistani freelancers made ‘unavailable’ on fiverr
The conclusions presented in the UNDP’s National Human Development Report 2023/24 are therefore, not surprising, recording a highly unequal range of digital development levels across the provinces and districts of Pakistan, ranging from high to moderate, low and very low digital development.
Out of the 36 districts of Punjab, only two districts – Lahore and Rawalpindi – are in the ‘high’ category. In Sindh, only one district, Karachi, stands out as ‘highly digitally developed’ i.e., one of 24.
Similarly, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), only two districts – Abbottabad and Peshawar – out of 32 are ranked at ‘high levels of digital development’. Balochistan, unsurprisingly has none in this category, with two districts – Quetta and Pishin – meeting the criteria for ‘moderate digital development’.
In fact, the scale actually starts with ‘very high digital development’ and only Islamabad, with a Digital Development Index (DDI) value of 0.570, is ranked in this category.
Among districts with ‘very low levels of digital development’ are 19 districts in Balochistan, 17 districts in KP, four districts in Punjab (although an additional 12 are categorized in the ‘low levels of digital development’ category) and eight in Sindh.
The report provides a devastating district-wise mapping of this digital exclusion, which is reproduced here because seeing these stark images sometimes help the message to get through, and this is a crucially important message to get through (beware the dark blue colour though, it doesn’t show high development)!
Moreover, for the past two months, Pakistan has been hit with rampant disruption to internet services, with users reporting outages and sluggish speeds across the country.
In a recent interview, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Digital Media and Minister of State Fahd Haroon blamed the disruption on a combination of two submarine cable failures and an ISP’s hardware issue simultaneously, denying the implementation of a government-imposed internet firewall.
Given this ground reality, it is patent that the ‘rails’ to build a Digital Pakistan do not extend into most of the country.
While we may pat ourselves on the back with our number of cellular and broadband subscriptions, in reality, the infrastructure is fragmented and highly inequitable, with limited scope for exponential growth by service providers, and very importantly, seamless data collection for the effective utilization of AI.
Locked into a narrow corridor around the Indus and a bulbous central Punjab, the private sector, it seems, is geared to just provide their services in areas with a glut—the primary cities.
This has stifled ‘innovation’ in product and service development reducing most efforts to tweaking user interfaces, choice of brand colour and screen avatars, and the latest restaurant discount.
In a perfect world, the private sector would step into a market of 240 million people, with more than 190 million SIM subscriptions. But with the telco sector tethered in taxes and duties, investment it seems, will have to come from the public sector and the donor community.
Given the myriad advantages offered by digitization, the expansion of digital infrastructure should be a core and significant offering in every Federal and Provincial PSDP and donor program.
If anything, it will be a far better use of local and foreign taxpayers’ funds than building a Wildlife Safari Park in the capital.
The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners