When i moved to Islamabad and started interacting with a variety of institutions in the capital, the one thing i realized was just how much was happening under the surface. Success stories like the HEC, NADRA, NR3C, ITP and PTCL among others have literally changed what it meant to interact with government (or ex-government now as the case may be) agencies to get work done. Sure, there are still many a black sheep here and there, clinging to an age old tradition of ‘under the table’, but the numbers, thankfully, are diminishing.

Once again, Pakistani’s are taking back Pakistan!

This story comes from NetworkWorld, contributed by our very own Rabia Garib of CIO Pakistan fame, about NADRA. A couple of months back, i had a session with one of their project managers who gave me an overview what NADRA was doing now and how exactly were these projects coming along. To me, one of the area’s i truly believe will bring back the pride, honour and commitment in our countrymen for the country is to celebrate it’s successes and take pride in the wonder’s we are doing in the world, and i desperately wanted the media to pick up on these. That’s where this post comes in.

In this story, Azhar Nawaz, another project manager, walks us through the challenges NADRA faced in the last three years to become what it has today. Please read the complete article for the insight, as i cannot do justice to it by summarizing. However, i will leave you with a quote which really got me going.

When talking about the ramp up of NADRA Swift Registration Centers (NSRC), Mr. Azhar says

“It was a huge success and we were registering up to 50,000 citizens in day during peak registration period.” There was no previous history of this kind of project anywhere in this world. What makes you appreciate this fact to an even greater extent, is the fact that NADRA was working within the confines of a political bureaucracy and red tape that was simply not used to such rapid escalation of any project. The kind of technology that had been deployed may have been extremely complex in its time, but it served a basic purpose — to build a database and archive the records for every registered citizen of Pakistan”

Link to article: http://edge.networkworld.com/news/2009/051409-a-database-is-born-nadra.html