Tania Aidrus, a former Google executive, is returning to the Digital Pakistan initiative

With the agreement of the current prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, former Google executive Tania Aidrus, who led Digital Pakistan’s effort in December 2019 under the former prime minister Imran Khan, joined the federal government’s digitization project once more.

According to a statement from the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, Tania Aidrus, a former Chief of Staff and Head of Strategic Initiatives on the Next Billion Users (NBU) team at the US tech giant, was named as the “convener” of the Digital Pakistan committee.

The secretary of the IT ministry was also a member of the committee, which would be led by the federal state minister for IT, according to the government.

In addition to guaranteeing openness and convenience in government procedures, the committee would gather suggestions for the nation’s ambitious project aiming to digitize infrastructure in a number of industries in accordance with contemporary technologies and advances.

Before being approached by the former Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) administration with the goal of improving government processes to match the global standards of the digital age, Aidrus lived more than half of her life outside of Pakistan, attending the best universities in the world and working at the forefront of the global tech industry.

She graduated with a BSc from Brandeis University and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Sloan School of Management.

Before joining Google as an executive, Tania co-founded ClickDiagnostics, a mobile health diagnostic startup that linked rural patients in developing nations with global physicians.

The IT specialist was also appointed special assistant to the prime minister in the federal cabinet headed by former PM Khan in 2019. Nevertheless, she was forced to leave from the PM’s House in July 2022 without warning because of her Canadian nationality, which she disclosed in a post on X.

Her founding of a non-governmental organization (NGO) was cited in some sources as another factor in her leaving, which generated discussion about conflicts of interest.