Right to unedited data

Earlier in October, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif refused to inaugurate the dashboard for flood victims because it was a static one, and failed the very purpose for which it was commissioned: to monitor flood relief assistance in real-time, without which relief monitoring wouldn’t be of international standard.

The world over that standard refers to transparency. The reason Pakistan needs a dashboard that reflects transparency in relief efforts is because the world doesn’t trust us to be honest in the disbursement of international aid. Given our track record, this time there’s widespread fear amongst both local and international donors over the misuse of these funds. That’s why the prime minister additionally announced a financial aid audit by the world’s reputable firms.

This is all well and good, but hardly effective. With the country in the crosshairs of climate calamities, it will be a huge burden on the exchequer to regularly carry out such an exercise, when there’s a better and more transparent alternative to a dashboard: a blockchained dashboard.

This is a system of digitally recording information in a way that makes it almost impossible to change or hack it. Information fed into dashboards can be altered at any point but blockchained information is recorded across many computers simultaneously in a decentralized manner so that it cannot be altered later. It’s essentially like making hundreds of photocopies of a receipt and spreading it around so that the proof of a transaction cannot be deleted, destroyed or edited. You can mess with one Xerox but not all of them.

Donations started pouring in as soon as the scale of flood devastation became visible. This time most of those donations were in kind and international relief funds came stringed with some sort of intermediary checks. This shows the world wants to help but doesn’t trust us.

We must not forget that global warming is just getting started. There’s more to come and if recent floods are anything to go by, Pakistan is the epicenter. We certainly don’t have the support structure to help us weather more storms. We will, sadly, continue to need the help of international and donor communities. But if our transparency record doesn’t improve dramatically, donors might just find other ways to bypass federal and provincial governments altogether. It’s not that far-fetched. We saw how almost all donations from within Pakistan were made to welfare organizations and NGOs, not the government.

Access to unedited information is the only way out. Solutions offered by technological advances leave us with no more excuses. When governments and their functionaries know their spending can be cross-checked down to the last paisa, delivery of public services will have no choice but to improve.

Article 19A of the constitution ensures the Right to Information (RTI), but it is blockchain that ensures the right to un-edited information. The difference lies in transparency. RTI is based upon the principle that citizens, being taxpayers, have the right to know how their money is spent.

But a 2019 survey by the Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives (CPDI) found that of the hundreds of information requests made to both federal and provincial governments, most went unanswered. Government institutions didn’t even bother to respond to the taxpayers who pay their salaries. To make sure the public is not stonewalled or hoodwinked by falsified information, developed democracies are using blockchain technology to make governments work efficiently and honestly.

Without blockchain, the right to information faces so many legal and administrative roadblocks that its function to hold governments accountable has simply failed. For starters, all information related to public expenditure should be blockchained and digitally available to people. Why make the public jump through hoops to get the information they are legally entitled to.

Sindh, which houses the financial hub of the country, passed the Transparency and Right to Information Bill in 2016, which mandates the government to keep the public informed of how public funds are spent by sharing such information as widely as possible, including posting it on the web.

But no such information is forthcoming. According to news reports, concerned citizens and welfare organizations are considering or already have petitioned the Sindh High Court to ensure transparency in flood relief funds. Right to information is recognized world over as a powerful tool against corruption, and the degree of transparency that accompanies this right measures the maturity of a society.

The writer is an executive producer, Geo News and editor of Jang – The Economist annual edition. She tweets @munazza193