The Punjab government has finalised a $35 million loan agreement with the World Bank aimed at accelerating the shift toward a cashless economy, officials confirmed. The financing, worth Rs9.9092 billion, will fund a broader push to digitise financial transactions and strengthen oversight of government revenue.
Officials said the project is designed to close longstanding gaps in the fiscal management by replacing cash-heavy processes with digital alternatives. Reducing reliance on cash transactions is expected to shrink opportunities for financial irregularities that have historically been difficult to trace under manual systems.
A central component of the initiative is the development of a digital infrastructure to monitor revenue collection in real time. Officials said this system would give authorities far greater visibility into government receipts than the existing paper-based framework allows, making it easier to detect discrepancies and enforce accountability.
More than Rs9.9 billion of the loan has been earmarked specifically for modernising the revenue-generation capacity of Punjab. The funding will support the digitisation of tax collection and other government dues, part of a wider effort to bring the fiscal architecture up to international standards with World Bank technical support.
For citizens, the most visible change will be the option to pay government fees, taxes and other official charges without cash. Officials expect that as digital payment adoption grows, it will translate directly into higher revenue collection for the provincial government, while also making the process more convenient and transparent for the public.
The loan reflects a broader pattern of World Bank engagement in Pakistan’s provincial finance sector, where digitisation projects have increasingly been positioned as a tool to improve tax compliance and reduce leakages in public revenue.
