The “WHY” behind Khan Meter
Back in 2013, when Imran Khan promised a lot of things and introduced the idea of ‘Naya Pakistan’, I had an idea that we need to come up with a system to hold people accountable and he was someone who wanted to be held accountable. At that time, I bought the domain ptimeter.com, but he didn’t win the election. I also bought a domain to track PML-N’s performance, but I knew at the time that they were not interested in being held accountable and I also realized that I couldn’t do the tracking without the help of the government. Now, when the 2018 Election came up and things were looking favorable for Mr. Khan, I got motivated again – I changed the name to khanmeter.com because it sounded better. I got the domain on 26th July, I gathered thee data from the 100 days agenda and the 5-year manifesto.
Imran Khan saying that he wanted to be held accountable for the government’s performance was what motivated me to start working on this idea. We’ve only been hearing politicians answer questions on talk shows. This government encouraged the public to ask the questions openly. I knew it’s going to be interesting to work on this because most of the things that Mr. Khan has promised are close to impossible to achieve because of the infrastructure we have and the mindsets of the people. I realized that it was a good time to start tracking the performance of the government and this should be a practice with any government from now on. As a result, if anyone gets elected who doesn’t intend to fulfill the promises made and someone tracks them, then it would be like policing the police.
The Long-term plan
What is the long-term vision for the platform? I started this as the 100 days agenda and I didn’t know that they’re going to start their own platform. This was a motivation for me that I’ve set a precedent for the government to track their performance. I study their website as well to track on my platform as well. As opposed to the initial idea of 100 days, I’m now thinking about doing it for 5 years, keeping in mind milestones after which I publish reports – the plan is to keep tracking. I don’t plan on making this my primary job. People have approached me for gathering a team and getting a grant – this is an organizational structure that I don’t want to go into. I realize that if I work on this myself, the pace would be slow and things will take time. Another idea I had for the long-term was that I would pick up indicators from the international organizations and gauge this government’s performance against those.
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