ASPHYXIATED by three excruciating liabilities — the Rs83 trillion debt we must repay, galloping population numbers we must accommodate and a colonial bureaucracy we must suffer, Pakistan ought to have had its ‘I can’t breathe’ moment a long time ago. Yet, there are no signs of urgency or even of understanding what is wrong and how to take the first step on the proverbial 4,000-mile journey.
Begin by eating the elephant, one bite at a time. Follow the Eliminate, Reduce, Combine and Automate approach. This article aims to describe a practical example of how this process improvement approach could be applied to merge two huge bureaucratic mountains — the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) and the Employees Old-age Benefits Institution (EOBI) into a single lean and efficient institution. The same methodology could then be replicated for hundreds of other departments with dormant, wasteful or overlapping functions.
The BISP has a single core function: distribute over Rs800 billion to the needy each year, a task that could be electronically performed by a handful of IT professionals. Instead, it is performed by 2,356 individuals that include a federal secretary, 550 directors-general (DGs), directors and assistant directors, 80 secretaries and assistants, 459 complaint assistants, 39 dispatch riders, 59 drivers, 386 chowkidars, 49 sweepers and 472 naib qasids, not to mention a fleet of 78 government vehicles.
The BISP’s performance can be best understood by its latest audit report. It reveals (not for the first time) irregular disbursements of over Rs25bn across 601,850 compromised cases that include government employees and duplicate beneficiaries. The delivery system spread over 1,255 bank branches, campsites, authorised agents and biometric verifications offers a tortuous and humiliating experience to more than 10 million beneficiaries. Agents extract their pound of flesh usually by deducting Rs1,500 to Rs2,000 from each payment. With about 44,000 BISP beneficiaries in Hyderabad, an illegal deduction of Rs2,000 from each payment could enable agents to siphon off an estimated Rs88m from one district alone. Nationwide, this would amount to the agents alone pilfering a staggering Rs80bn each year.
Merging BISP and EOBI can reduce welfare corruption.
The EOBI, a department that ought to have been disbanded at least five decades ago, is composed of 657 individuals that include a chairman, 274 DGs, directors and assistant directors, 211 private secretaries, PAs, and assistants, 138 qasids and naib qasids, not to mention a flotilla of 96 government vehicles. This department may well be pioneering one of the biggest injustices in modern history — depriving 76m workers of their right to pension.
Of Pakistan’s 80m workforce, employers deposit monthly EOBI contributions for less than four per cent. This means that an overwhelming 96pc of workers will receive zero pension when they retire — a misery that no bureaucrat has ever experienced. Why must Pakistani citizens suffer because of these bureaucratic structures of Himalayan incompetence?
Now imagine that the existing BISP and EOBI, that have a combined strength of over 3,000 employees, are merged into a single department of about 300 employees, called the ‘Benazir Income and Old-age Support Programme’ (‘BIOSP’) — or by any other name. A process improvement exercise for this new department could eliminate the entire chain of agents, inspectors, campsites, bank branches and biometric verification, along with the monthly or quarterly ordeal of queuing before banks and agents. All it requires is sending all income support payments as well as EOBI pensions, electronically to each beneficiary’s authorised phone number directly.
The rampant corruption within the existing EOBI system actually incentivises employers to register and pay contributions for only a fraction of their employees, often in exchange for under-the-table benefits. This can be easily eliminated by changing the process: mandating all salary payments only through banks and forcing employers to send each worker’s salary under two heads — salary and 6pc pension contribution. The bank credits the salary into the workers’ account and sends the 6pc pension contribution directly to the ‘BIOSP’. Making pension contributions an integral part of every salary, mandating the use of banking channels and automating the transfer of contributions, would be a polite way of dismantling the existing EOBI.
Hundreds of departments can be eliminated or merged and replaced by lean and efficient institutions one-tenth their size. Process improvement is hugely dependent on data, digitisation and integration of all government databases. Can Nadra please step forward to make this dream come true?
The writer is an industrial engineer and a volunteer social activist.
naeemsadiq@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2026