It seems that the move towards a cashless economy has been taken over by bureaucrats, for the weekly implementation meeting on the Digital Transformation Plan chaired by the Prime Minister was informed of the progress made: rules had been formulated for the Pakistan Digital Authority and the National Digital Commission. That is one of the favourite activities of the bureaucracy: formulating rules. Mr Shehbaz Sharif will probably be told at the next meeting that the rules have been amended. His call to the provincial governments to cooperate with the federal government in the implementation of this plan does not seem to contain anything that would get as much attention as the process of appointments of the Chairman and members of the Digital Authority, which the PM was told was in its final stage. It is to be hoped that Mr Sharif does not allow either the Authority or the Commission to become a parking place for bureaucrats, and that they do actual work instead of formulating yet more rules.
A case could well be made that rules have been strangling growth. How, in a digital economy, will payments be made to the government. At present, making a payment is perhaps more difficult than having a tooth extracted. There is the need (apparently inviolable) for the bank acting as a sub-teasury to issue a challan in triplicate, which the hapless payer must fill out. He makes the payment (quite often but not always) by standing in line in the open, keeps one of the bank challan forms as a receipt, and stands in another line to give in the other two forms to an accounts clerk at the government office concerned. That clerk keeps one challan form for his own record, and passes the other form to another, higher accounting authority.
A proposal for utility bills, that all have a QR code, is needed for official payments, a lot of which are provincial. However, as this would increase the convenience of the citizen, it has no appeal for the kind of people who will staff the Commission and the Authority, if the bureaucracy has its way. One bottleneck will be the fact that people will need bank accounts. Some of the work has been done by the Benazir Income Support Programme, most of whose potential beneficiaries did not have a bank account. However, apart from convenience, the government must also take care of security. Otherwise people will prefer to stay with cash.
