At around 5 p.m., Samina Hassan Laghari leaves her office in Karachi. She waits about half an hour for a bus, spends another hour to 90 minutes traveling and then walks 15 minutes home. In a report published in Dawn in September 2026, Laghari describes the poorly lit roads, speeding traffic and safety concerns that make the last stretch of her journey difficult.

Her experience captures an economic cost that rarely appears in official statistics: the time people lose simply trying to get home.

For Pakistan, lost time is not merely an inconvenience. It is lost opportunity: hours that could have been spent working, learning, caring for family or building a business. When everyday journeys and administrative delays add up, the cost extends beyond individual frustration to the productivity of the economy itself.

The question deserves attention now. A 2026 knowledge brief by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) describes Pakistan’s long-term productivity decline and identifies structural distortions, regulatory burdens and weak firm capabilities among the constraints holding the economy back. Growth cannot rely indefinitely on adding more resources. The country must also use them more efficiently, and time is part of that equation.

A striking example emerged in February. Dawn reported that ride-hailing company Yango credited its routing technology with saving 832,617 hours on trips in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad in 2025. That is the company’s own estimate, based on its own trips. But it raises a useful question: if a private company can estimate the time its routing system saves, why do public authorities not routinely measure the time their own systems cost citizens?

The losses are visible in ordinary life. A long, unreliable commute can put a job out of reach, particularly for workers who cannot afford private transport. For women, the challenge may continue after the bus journey ends. Poor lighting, unsafe crossings and the cost of getting home from the last stop can turn a short walk into another burden. As Laghari’s account shows, access to transport depends on more than the route. It depends on whether the entire journey is affordable, safe and predictable.

Businesses face a similar problem. The World Bank’s 2022 Enterprise Survey found that 50.7 percent of surveyed firms in Pakistan experienced electrical outages. The figure is four years old, but it shows how widespread the reliability problem is. An outage can halt production, delay deliveries, leave workers idle and force firms to spend time and money on alternatives. Administrative delays add another layer of friction when businesses must repeatedly chase applications, approvals or payments.

If a private company can estimate the time its routing system saves, why do public authorities not routinely measure the time their own systems cost citizens?

Mehreen Durrani

No credible national estimate exists of what these lost hours cost Pakistan’s economy. But the country does not need one to start measuring the problem and tackling the processes that cause avoidable delays.

The first priority should be urban mobility. The Sindh Mass Transit Authority, working with Karachi’s transport and municipal agencies, should measure door-to-door journey times on selected commuter routes. That means recording not only time spent on a bus, but also waiting, transfers and the walk home. Results should be broken down by gender and time of day where possible, with passenger feedback used to identify unsafe or unreliable stretches. Publishing the results would show whether transport improvements are genuinely cutting the time and difficulty of getting to work.

The second priority is better national data. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics should carry out an updated national time-use survey. The United Nations Statistics Division lists Pakistan’s most recent Time Use Survey as dating from 2007. Pakistan’s Household Integrated Economic Survey for 2024-25 provides recent information on income, consumption and social conditions. A dedicated time-use survey would answer a different question: how people actually divide their days between paid work, unpaid care, travel and everything else.

Third, federal and provincial departments should publish service standards for routine public processes. Each should state how long a service is expected to take, which agency is responsible and how a delayed case can be escalated. Departments should then report actual processing times alongside their targets. Digital tracking can help, but putting a slow process online does not make it efficient. The process itself must be simplified, and responsibility for delays must be clear.

These reforms are practical because they do not require Pakistan to put a value on every minute before acting. They require public institutions to treat time as an outcome worth measuring. A shorter commute, a more reliable electricity supply or an approval delivered on schedule may seem modest on its own. Together, such changes allow workers and firms to plan, produce and take part more fully in the economy.

Pakistan has good reason to track growth, investment, exports and fiscal performance. But these indicators tell only part of the story. They do not capture the daily friction that keeps people from opportunities and businesses from using their resources well.

A country cannot recover every hour lost to distance or circumstance. It can, however, reduce the hours lost to avoidable inefficiency. Pakistan’s productivity challenge is not only about producing more with what it has. It is also about letting people use their time well.

The hours are already being spent. The question is whether Pakistan will keep losing them unnoticed, or finally begin giving them back.

Mehreen Durrani is a strategy and transformation independent professional operating at the intersection of policy and technology, driving digital transformation and strategic partnerships to deliver institutional and economic impact.