About Data Darbar

The project

Data Darbar is an open explorer of Pakistan's official statistics. It brings together the population census, household and labour-force surveys, 8-digit external-trade data, the national accounts, the federal budget and the central bank's monetary and external-sector series — sources published by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), the Finance Division and the State Bank of Pakistan — into a single set of interactive views. The name is a nod to the shrine in Lahore, reimagined here as a place of gathering for Pakistan's data.

Every figure is traceable to its published source, and the cleaned data behind the site is held in a queryable DuckDB + Parquet warehouse rather than locked inside PDFs.

The four views

• District & Tehsil Map — census, PSLM, labour-force, household and DHS health indicators across the available district records (coverage varies by source), with a 2017 vs 2023 comparison; a multidimensional poverty index built from household microdata at district level; satellite measures of relative wealth, population and night-time lights at tehsil level; and the Mouza Census 2020 inventory of what rural villages actually have.
• Trade Atlas — every 8-digit HS commodity as an Atlas-style treemap grouped by sector, with drill-down, top partners and change over time (2015–2024).
• GDP & Budget — GDP by sector and real growth, the 2015-16 input-output flows, and the federal budget's receipts and expenditure as a detailed line-item treemap.
• Monetary & External — State Bank of Pakistan series: the rupee since 1947, the policy rate since 1956, inflation, the interbank curve, reserves, the current account broken down to individual commodities, remittances by source, the money supply and bad loans.

A fifth page, Query the Data, opens the whole warehouse — every table behind the four views — to SQL in the browser, with nothing sent to a server. A data dictionary documents every table, column, unit and caveat.

Built by

Hiba Sameen is an economist and data scientist based in London. She holds a PhD in Economics and has worked across academia, government and think tanks on economic policy, with an interest in data science and engineering focused on making public data more accessible. Data Darbar grew out of the frustration of comparing Pakistani statistics that are scattered across PDF tables and separate reports.

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Sources

• Population & Housing Census 2017 and 2023 — district demographic, education and employment tables.
• PSLM, LFS & HIES — social/living-standards, labour-force and household income & expenditure surveys. PSLM 2019-20 is a district-level round and carries urban and rural households alike; HIES 2024-25 is a provincial round whose urban stratum is the division, so its district figures are rural-only (see Methodology).
• PSLM district FIES — district-level food insecurity (moderate or severe) as published by PBS on the PSLM district dashboard, computed on FAO's FIES methodology.
• PDHS 2017-18 — Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey microdata, published by the National Institute of Population Studies (NIPS): family planning, fertility, maternal & child health, and child nutrition, at district level. Also fills the AJK & Gilgit-Baltistan districts the census tables omit.
• External Trade Statistics — 8-digit HS imports and exports by commodity and partner country, 2015–2024.
• National Accounts (2015-16 base) — GDP by sector, real growth and the supply-use / input-output table.
• Federal Budget "Budget in Brief" — receipts and expenditure line items, 2009–2027.
• Industry Statistics (QIM & CMI) — Quantum Index of large-scale Manufacturing (monthly and annual, 2005-06 and 2015-16 bases) and the Census of Manufacturing Industries.
• State Bank of Pakistan, EasyData — 1,336 monthly, quarterly, daily and annual series from 33 datasets, pulled through SBP's REST API: exchange rates (from Aug-1947), the policy rate (from Jan-1956), the CPI/SPI/WPI (2015-16 base), KIBOR, lending and deposit rates, reserves (from Jun-1948), the BPM6 balance of payments, export receipts and import payments by commodity, services trade, country-wise workers' remittances (from Jul-1972), repatriation of profits by sector, monetary aggregates and non-performing loans.
• Poverty & satellite — Alkire–Foster Multidimensional Poverty Index from PSLM microdata, plus Meta's Relative Wealth Index, WorldPop population, VIIRS night-lights and the PBS Mouza Census 2020 facility inventory at tehsil level.

All sources are public publications of the Government of Pakistan and the State Bank of Pakistan, except the Relative Wealth Index (Meta / Data for Good) and VIIRS night-lights (NASA/NOAA).