E government in Pakistan

Recently, I have been visiting a lot of Pakistani government web sites. Some of the sites are quite remarkable. The only problems seems to be the regular maintenance. It is not as frequent as it should be. For example Pakistan Post is comprehensive and well laid out but was last update on February 17th,2006. Also, the broken links leave a very bad impression like searching for a postal code of a specific place lands you on a "IIS error page".

On the other hand, the official government portal is pretty boring. You cannot really find much on it besides an abundance of forms. A lot of these web sites are undertaken by Electronic government directorate.

Interestingly, according to United Nation Pakistan's literacy rate is less than 50%. This ofcourse includes people who can only read and write their names in Urdu. This at the same time implies that people who can read and write English fluently in Pakistan is not greater then 20. So all these web sites in English are useless for common man. The joint efforts made by EGD and curlp can make a difference. Curlp is a research organization at my ex university NUCES, developing Urdu fonts recently released under GPL. There is a seperate page for their joint efforts but as usuall that too was last updated on 18th August 2004. :)