A Pakistani developer has independently built and launched Ask Pakistan, an artificial intelligence-powered search platform that consolidates information from 212 official federal, provincial, and regulatory websites into a single conversational interface, allowing citizens to ask questions about government services in English, Urdu, or Roman Urdu and receive answers sourced directly from official pages. The project was built by Raheel Siddiqui, inspired in part by the United States government’s America.gov portal, which combines information from more than 29,000 federal websites into a unified AI-assisted service discovery tool, and adapts a similar concept for Pakistan’s fragmented government information landscape.
The platform’s design reflects a clear-eyed understanding of the problems it is solving. Pakistan’s government information is spread across dozens of independently maintained federal ministries, provincial departments, regulatory authorities, and public sector institutions, each with its own website structure, update frequency, and navigation logic. For a citizen trying to find information about renewing a CNIC, checking tax obligations, applying for a job through the Federal Public Service Commission, understanding BISP eligibility, or tracking a court case, the current experience typically involves multiple searches across multiple sites with no guarantee of reaching accurate or current information. Ask Pakistan’s directory of 212 websites currently covers NADRA, FBR, BISP, the Higher Education Commission, FPSC, PTA, provincial governments, police departments, utilities, and courts, with the platform currently searching more than 5,000 indexed pages from those sources.
The accuracy and honesty constraints built into the system are among its more important design choices. Answers are drawn only from the indexed official government sources and include the original source information along with next steps the user may need to take. If the platform’s sources do not contain an answer to a question, the system is designed to say so explicitly rather than generating a plausible-sounding response, a guardrail that directly addresses the hallucination risk that makes unconstrained AI tools dangerous when citizens rely on them for information about legal, financial, or administrative matters. The multilingual capability, supporting queries in English, Urdu, and Roman Urdu, is equally significant, ensuring that the platform is accessible to citizens who communicate primarily in Urdu rather than English, which would otherwise exclude a large majority of Pakistan’s population from using a conversational government information tool.
Privacy protections have been integrated directly into the platform’s architecture. Personal information including CNIC numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, passport numbers, and bank numbers is removed in the user’s browser before a question is transmitted to the platform, ensuring that sensitive identifying information is never sent. The platform does not retain conversation histories or associate questions with individual users, and voice queries sent through the microphone are transcribed through Google’s Gemini speech service and not stored by Ask Pakistan. Raheel Siddiqui has been transparent about the platform’s current limitations: it is an independent project with no official government backing, and cannot submit applications, access personal government records, or complete transactions on a user’s behalf. Users are advised to verify time-sensitive information such as fees and deadlines directly from the relevant official source. Siddiqui’s longer-term vision for the project is to evolve from information retrieval toward agentic government services, where the system could help citizens fill forms, book appointments, and track applications end to end, but that would require official API access and secure integration with government systems that the independent project does not currently have. As a starting point, Ask Pakistan is a concrete demonstration that a single Pakistani developer working independently can build civic technology that meaningfully improves citizens’ ability to navigate a complex and fragmented government information environment.
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