LAHORE: Getting access to government services can prove costly, time-consuming and confusing.

Though a myriad of services are provided through free government-run e-platforms, these remain fragmented across various domains, foreing people to run from pillar to post just to ascertain how they should go about availing a specific service.

To solve this problem, a Karachi-based developer hascome up with a simple yet elegant solution.

The `Ask Pakistan` platform, the brainchild of Raheel Siddiqui, is a website where a chatbot can help people seeking government services obtain the required information, thus bridgingthe gap between the state and its citizens.

Talking to Dawn, Mr Siddiqui said that many nontech-savvy people struggled with getting the required information. `The information is available and the government is actually good inproviding directions on how to avail public services, but the problem is that there are a lot of services. There is no unified platform which can give you information about all of them.` This, he said, was his motivation behind building the platform.

The idea came to him when his friend saw a tweet about a US government website that collated all citizen-related services on one page. `He said that it will be great if we have something like this in Pakistan. It took me a couple of hours to build the basic app and I sent it to him. He used it and told me to post about it online, and I did.

Mr Siddiqui didn`t expect a lot of attention and said that he was surprised when it went viral. `I got something like 500,000 views in a few hours, he added.He described his platform as an information provider and said that it only provided publicly available data, which was already there but was scattered across different government bodies on a large number of separate websites.

How it works The pakistangov.online website has a simple interface with bilingual labels for each section, and it greets the user with the message: `Ask anything about a government service. Get a clear answer from official sources, with the next steps.` The website has no sign-up, and it doesn`t require users to input any personal information. According to Mr Siddiqui, privacy was always a concern, which is reflected in how the website is set up.

Users can input their queries, with common questionssuch as `How do I renew my CNIC?` being offered as examples. The questions can be in English, Urdu or Roman Urdu. After processing the query, the chatbot gives a detailed step-by-step answer.

The platform currently collates information from 52 government websites, including the Directorate General of Immigration & Passports, National Database & Registration Authority (Nadra), Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), Higher Education Commission (HEC), as well as many other federal and provincial departments.

Official interest Mr Siddiqui told Dawn that he was surprised when the government showed interest in his work. Being Gen Z, he said he used to think of the govern-ment as a `very old-school and laid-back organisation` `Recently, the IT minister also contacted me and I am talking to the ministry`s team about the future direction of the project. They are very open and I think they have some great ideas and need people to execute these ideas.

They have been very good and supportive and asked me what I needed to further this platform,` he said, adding that he was very surprised by it.

When contacted, IT minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja confirmed her ministry`s interest in the project and said that Mr Siddiqui had been invited to the ministry in Islamabad.

Subsequently, Mr Siddiqui presented his work to the minister and her team.

A detailed version of this article can be accessed on Dawn.com