ISLAMABAD – Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, Professor Ahsan Iqbal, inaugurated the ‘National Big Data Portal’ on Thursday to upscale the future of tech in Pakistan. The minister called it a revolutionary step in Pakistan’s technology sector.
This platform is developed by LUMS with the support of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) and is designed to centralize access to public data to make it more usable for researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and citizens.
According to the Minister, this is not just a digital tool but a representation of Pakistan’s commitment to lead the global data revolution.
“Our development narrative will now be articulated in code, processed in the cloud, and interpreted through data,” he declared, emphasizing that harnessing data is no longer a strategic choice but a national necessity.
He highlighted the importance of data in the innovation of the current world and said it is the currency of modern economies. However, structural barriers like fragmented data systems, limited analytical capacity, and poor institutional coordination are still faced by Pakistan.
He emphasized that we can overcome these barriers by shifting from backwards analytics to modern and advanced analytics. Datasets must be used to face the real-world challenges and drive actionable decisions.
The minister explained that big data and cloud computing will help to establish a smarter governance, more responsive public services, better education and healthcare and solid climate resilience.
He also mentioned Pakistan’s recent achievements in the technology sector, such as Pakistan’s first digital census using geotagged and cloud-based tools, the development of sovereign cloud infrastructure in collaboration with the Ministry of IT, the establishment of AI centers in universities, and partnerships with global tech giants like Microsoft, Google Cloud, Huawei, and AWS for skills training and technology transfer.
The PBS, as Pakistan’s national statistical authority, will serve as the backbone of this initiative as it will play a significant role in supplying reliable and updated data to the portal.
The Minister praised the strong infrastructure and academic skills, highlighting them as a model for evidence-based decision-making. He emphasized the need for schools to incorporate data science and cloud computing across all subjects, including agriculture, health, urban planning, and economics. He urged universities to develop local solutions for issues like improving crops in Sindh, predicting water shortages in Balochistan, and managing traffic in Karachi.
Furthermore, He introduced a new national innovation ecosystem to combine the country’s fragmented research initiatives called “Quantum Valley Pakistan”. This platform will serve as the national digital innovation hub.
He said that a collective action is required by the government, academia, and youth to shift from “talk to transformation.”
