We often hear that Pakistan’s passport is not very strong or desirable, since many people presumably would move to another country if given a choice and the chance.
We hear of the passport index which ranks national passports on how readily (or not) citizens of the respective countries are able to travel across the world without visas. As expected, Pakistan ranks quite low on the index with only a handful countries allowing its citizens visa-free entry.
With this context in mind, we also have cases where people wait for years just to become actual citizens. I can recount one case like this – though there are countless others – from personal experience.
There is a woman who works as a domestic helper in three homes in Karachi. Her husband is a cleaner and also makes a living walking dogs. They have two children, a son aged three and a daughter aged five. And the tragedy is that neither of their children can go to a school. The reason is that only one parent has a computerised National Identity Card (CNIC) – the mother doesn’t have it. And to have a birth certificate from NADRA, they need for both parents to have a CNIC.
Till that happens, no school is willing to admit them. This is happening in a country with one of the highest school dropout rates, which measures the proportion of children of schoolgoing age not enrolled in school (in 2024 the National Assembly was told that there are 10 million such children).
The question then becomes why the mother doesn’t have a CNIC. That is because she is from a relatively poor background a member of a minority community (as is the husband). She was born in the home and not at a hospital, which means she doesn’t have the hospital record that she needs to obtain a birth certificate issued by the union council of the area where she resides. This happens to be Karachi’s District South.
The couple has been trying for at least a couple of years to get citizenship papers for both the mother and the children but so far they have failed – or it would be safe to say that the state has failed them. The mother is born in Pakistan and so did the two children, but because of red tape, bureaucracy and convoluted rules, all three are unable to prove in the eyes of the law that they are Pakistani nationals.
The husband and wife first went to NADRA to get the wife’s CNIC made and were told that she first needed to get her birth certificate made. But since she has no record of her home birth, they didn’t know what to do next. However, they figured that they should try their luck getting their children’s birth certificates.
One was born in KMC Hospital in Gizri and the other was born in the famous Lady Dufferin Hospital, a specialised privately-run facility catering to women. Because of its relatively low charges and because of its location, it is also used widely by women from low-income areas. However, the NADRA staff told the couple they first needed to obtain a birth certificate issued by the local union council and then they would be able to have a birth certificate issued by the authority.
But the problem was that to get the union council to issue a birth certificate for their children, the requirement, they were told, was that both parents needed to have CNICs. But since the mother doesn’t have one, it was back to square one. The parents are extremely unhappy and frustrated that despite being citizens of Pakistan they are unable to prove that and unable to send their children to school.
The question in all this is: what should someone who is in the same predicament as the mother do? She doesn’t have a record of her birth since it happened at home. Without a document provided by a hospital, how will the local union council issue her a birth certificate? By the same logic, it can be said that there must be tens of thousands of people in the country who were born not in a medical facility but in the home – and what does the state do for them? How are they to become citizens so that they or their children are able to enroll in a school or a college?
Surely there has to be a way for such people to be helped – even if they have no documentary evidence of their birth. They have families here and this woman has a husband and the local union council can verify all this through her family members, many of whom do have CNICs.
Or does the state think that it’s fine if all these tens of thousands of people are not able to get a birth certificate or a CNIC? And hence their very existence as a citizen and resident of Pakistan remains undocumented and uncounted.
The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. He tweets/posts @omar_quraishi and can be reached at: [email protected]
