Pakistan has never lacked talk about accountability. What it has lacked is a steady, local way to measure it, repeat it, and then force institutions to respond to the results. That is why the Index of Transparency and Accountability in Pakistan, iTAP, should be treated as more than a one-time survey. If it turns into a yearly or bi-annual benchmark that the public, media, and government all take seriously, it can reshape how reforms are chosen and judged. The real power of iTAP is not that it tells us corruption exists. Everyone already believes that. Its power is that it breaks the story into measurable parts, by institution, by region, and by what citizens actually face.
Pakistan’s public debate often gets stuck in a loop. A scandal breaks, outrage rises, a few arrests are made, and then the system returns to normal. That cycle is good for headlines but bad for long-term change. Indices can help break the loop only if they do two things. They must reflect local reality, and they must point to the specific points where citizens pay the cost. Global rankings rarely do either. They are designed for cross-country comparison, so they smooth out the details that matter inside Pakistan.
They also tend to lean on expert ratings and secondary sources, which may reflect elite impressions more than the everyday experiences of citizens standing at counters, dealing with files, or trying to get a basic service without delay
iTAP changes the center of gravity by focusing on lived experience alongside perception. That distinction is not academic. It is the difference between fear and fact, between what we assume happens everywhere and what actually happens during a recent interaction. The early iTAP results show how wide that gap can be. Many Pakistanis perceive bribery, nepotism, and illicit enrichment as common, yet far fewer report personal experience of these malpractices. The composite scores make this even clearer, with a much higher perception index than the lived experience index. If policymakers ignore this gap, they risk designing reforms that chase public anger instead of fixing the most frequent pain points. If they study the gap carefully, they can target the real bottlenecks and also deal with the trust deficit that keeps perceptions stuck in the worst possible place.
The credibility of iTAP also matters because Pakistanis are tired of claims without proof. The methodology, done with Ipsos and the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, using face-to-face Computer Assisted Personal Interviews, and sampling based on the Pakistan Digital Census 2024, gives the exercise weight. A sample of over 6,000 respondents across 82 districts and 195 tehsils, with gender balance and urban-rural coverage, is hard to dismiss as a niche snapshot.
It is not perfect, no survey is, but it is solid enough to be used as a baseline that can be repeated and compared across years
The choice of institutions is equally important because it keeps the conversation grounded. People interact with the police, NADRA, traffic police, courts, utilities like WAPDA and DISCOs, gas companies like SSGC and SNGPL, municipal services, hospitals, schools, passport offices, excise, FBR, and land record offices. These are not abstract parts of the state. These are the places where time is lost, dignity is tested, and small payments or favors can become normalized. If iTAP tracks these institutions over time, it can show which reforms reduce malpractice and which reforms only change paperwork.
Still, an index by itself does not reform anything. It only creates pressure and direction. For iTAP to matter, it has to be turned into a reform loop that institutions cannot ignore. That begins with public release of disaggregated findings, not just a national headline score. District and tehsil level reporting can help identify where the same institution performs differently across locations. That difference is often where the truth sits. If NADRA performs strongly in satisfaction, what practices are driving that: staffing, process design, digitization, queue management, complaint response, and which of those can be copied by other agencies?
If certain services show low lived experience of malpractice, those become models worth studying. If certain offices show repeated problems, those become targets for focused inspection, training, and enforcement
The second step is to link results to management, not just publicity. If a department’s lived experience score worsens, that should trigger a review of procedures and oversight. If an agency improves, it should receive public credit and internal rewards that make good behavior worthwhile. Without incentives and consequences, numbers remain numbers. The goal is to push institutions to compete on clean service delivery in a way that citizens can feel, shorter wait times, fewer unnecessary steps, fewer discretionary points where officials can delay files, and clear written rules for fees and timelines.
The third step is to treat perception as a reform area of its own. The iTAP results suggest many Pakistanis are more pessimistic than their personal experiences justify, and that pessimism damages compliance and trust. People who expect corruption tend to look for shortcuts, intermediaries, or agents, even when a clean route exists. That creates a market for middlemen and feeds the very system people complain about. Institutions need to publish simple service standards and monthly performance stats, and they need complaint channels that work quickly enough to be believable.
If a citizen reports malpractice and never hears back, perception hardens. If a citizen reports malpractice and sees action, perception can change
The findings on awareness are a warning sign here. Recognition of anti-corruption bodies is not the same as engagement, and awareness of rights is low. If only a small share of citizens know Right to Information laws or whistleblower protections, then reporting will remain rare, and fear will remain high. A serious response would pair measurement with public education, clear reporting routes, protection of complainants, and visible outcomes that show reporting is worth the risk.
iTAP can help Pakistan shift from slogans to diagnosis. It gives the country a way to say, this is where citizens meet the state, this is what they fear, this is what they face, and this is what changed since last year. If the index stays independent, is repeated consistently, and is used to drive real fixes at the level of offices and processes, it can do what global rankings cannot. It can make accountability practical, local, and measurable, and it can turn reform into something citizens can actually notice in their daily lives.
