Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) has said that public services should be designed around the people who use them, and that they should not be built centrally and then handed to citizens to adjust to later. To put this into practice, the Citizen Experience (CX) team of the authority conducted field research in Bhera, in Sargodha district, to explore the use cases that have been identified for the agriculture sector. The team worked directly with the farmers who stand to benefit most from the digitisation of agriculture. The visit shows that the authority is gathering information from the people who will use the services, rather than relying only on planning carried out in offices.
During the research, the team spoke to farmers about the challenges behind each use case, and it observed them using the Mera Kissan and e-Zarkhaiz portals. The aim was to see from the perspective of the user where each process works and where it stalls. According to the authority, these conversations brought up practical problems that desk research could not have captured. Watching farmers use the portals in real conditions allows the team to identify the steps at which users face difficulty, which can differ from what the designers of a service expect, and it gives the authority direct evidence about how the existing portals perform.
Citizen experience is a central part of the mandate of PDA under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025. Along with leading the digital transformation of Pakistan and building the National Digital Masterplan, the authority is working towards reinventing government services and making them citizen centric. The authority described field research as the way in which it puts citizen centricity into practice, which places the Bhera visit within its formal responsibilities and not as a separate activity carried out by one team.
The findings from Bhera will be built into the agriculture component of the masterplan, and they will be used to refine the use cases and the services that are built on them. The team will travel next to Gujranwala, and more districts are to follow. This plan means that the authority intends to repeat the exercise in several parts of the country, so that the agriculture component of the National Digital Masterplan reflects the experience of farmers in different districts, and that the services developed for agriculture are tested against the needs of the people who will use them.
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