How NADRA Can Improve Services For Overseas Pakistanis

These are the opportunities to further enhance the quality of services NADRA offers. They broadly fall into the following categories:

1. Cost of Services

2. Service Level

3. Ease of Use

Cost of Services

• First, CNIC is free for all Pakistanis. However, this facility is not extended to Overseas Pakistanis.

  • Given NICOP is required for Overseas Voting, additional sensitivity and considerations around this. On the face of it, this practice seems like discrimination against the Overseas Pakistanis’ per the Free and Fair Elections Criteria laid out by the Inter-Parliamentary Union[Section 2(1)(2)].

• Cost of Delivery of Card

  • I understand that a family can’t combine cards to the same address to avoid paying multiple delivery fees. 

• Cost of Change of Address

  • The cost of updating one address for a family is quite high. Ideally, there should be no cost for updating one’s record such as an address. When a fee is charged on a record update transaction, it deters people from keeping their records corrected. 

Service Levels 

• Overseas Pakistanis have no local or toll-free number to call for support. They have to make an international call to +92 51 111 786 100 to speak to the NADRA. This can be pretty expensive and unaffordable. The technology to set up a VOIP based call rerouting is commonplace.  

• Since the diaspora is spread across the globe, the contact center should be 24/7. 

• Lack of any real-time online support.  In today’s day and age of Digital Customer Experience, there is an opportunity to offer 24/7 omnichannel support in the form of:

  • Online chat

  • In-App chat

  • SMS/Whatsapp 

Ease of Use

• Renewal or modification of the ID Card forms should not take more than 5-10 minutes in most cases. In contrast, citizens must fill out the forms from scratch(including information already available with  NADRA) and correct the auto-generated Urdu. This can be long and arduous. There is an opportunity to re-design the whole experience.

• Similarly, there is an opportunity to re-design several other interactions/forms to make it easy for end-users.