By Dr. Zeeshan Qasim
The federal government has done something in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s eleven worst-affected districts that it has not managed in thirteen years of promising to fix them during the previous government tenure. It has created a structure, the Area Development Secretariat, with the governor and the chief secretary sitting directly above it, answerable to Islamabad rather than to a provincial cabinet that the federal government itself just suspended. Whether that structure becomes the first government these districts have had that actually works, or merely a new signboard on an old failure, is now the only question worth asking.
Pakistan has tried the signboard before. In September 2020 the Punjab government unveiled the South Punjab Secretariat in Multan, with Prime Minister Imran Khan promising that decisions for Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan would finally be made by the people who lived there rather than in Lahore. 4 billion rupees went into the building. Within a year a fact-finding report found 72 % of its posts vacant, with more than two hundred bureaucrats simply refusing transfer there. A later government removed its secretaries altogether. Its own founding minister was reduced to asking, in public, why the money had been spent at all if Lahore still decided everything. That is the fate the word “secretariat” now carries in Pakistani administration, and it is exactly the fate the eleven districts of Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Kurram, Orakzai, North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Bannu, Lakki Marwat, Tank and Dera Ismail Khan cannot afford to repeat.
The gap these districts carry is not a rounding error. The 2023 census put Bajaur’s literacy rate at 26 % against a provincial average of 51 %, Orakzai at 34 %, and Kurram at 46. Among women the numbers collapse further, falling to 12 % in Bajaur, 15 % in Orakzai, and under 9 % in Kurram’s central tehsil, against a provincial female average of 37 Health researchers working with the Asian Development Bank put the maternal mortality ratio in these districts at roughly 261 to 395 deaths per hundred thousand live births against a provincial figure near 165 to 175, which is to say a tribal mother is dying at close to double the rate of a mother sixty five Kilometers away in a settled district of the same province. None of this is new information. It was known when the federal government launched its Tribal Decade Strategy in 2020 and pledged a 100 billion rupees a year for a decade. In that program’s first year, only 37 billion of the 72 billion pledged by Islamabad was actually released, and the province released 01 billion of the 11 billion it had promised itself. In one documented case the KP energy department managed to spend 05 million rupees out of a PKRS 2.57 billion allocation meant for fifty projects in these districts, forty-nine of which never started.
This is what a referral structure produces. Money gets announced, a department somewhere gets the file, and nothing moves because no single office has the authority to make it move. The alternative model already exists and has been tested at a scale larger than anything KP needs. When Indonesia had to rebuild Aceh after the 2004 tsunami, it did not create a liaison office. It created the BRR, a reconstruction agency with statutory power under presidential regulation to override line ministries, control its own budget, and answer to no one but the president. In under four years it built over 140,000 houses, 3,600 kilometers of road, and nearly 1,500 schools, hit 94 % of its targets, and then dissolved itself on schedule and handed the region back to its own provincial government. It worked because it had real authority and a real deadline, not because it had a nicer building than Multan’s.
The Area Development Secretariat has been given something South Punjab never had, direct operational and administrative control over officials posted in these eleven districts and exemption from the ordinary Rules of Business that slow every other department in the province. That is the legal raw material for a BRR. What it still needs is a culture to match the law. It should not be staffed by officers rotating through on punishment postings or waiting out a transfer, but recruited the way a serious company hires, on performance contracts, with incentives tied to outcomes delivered rather than files processed, and led by people who understand that a widow in Kurram waiting on a compensation claim is not a case number.
The clearest test of whether that culture exists will be the smallest offices it builds. Every tehsil in these eleven districts needs one window, open to anyone, that takes any complaint at all, a missing goat, a disputed well, a pension approval file that has sat in Peshawar for three years, logs it, and routes it to whichever department actually owns the problem. The applicant gets a tracking number and an SMS when the status changes, the way a courier company or an online order in Pakistan tells you where your parcel is. It sounds almost too modest a thing to put beside 100-billion-rupee strategies and reconstruction agencies. It is in fact the only mechanism by which any of that money becomes visible to the people it was meant for. A family does not experience a ten-year strategy. It experiences whether someone answered the phone.
Rs 01 trillion has now been promised again, under the name Roshan Qabail. The people of these eleven districts have heard that number before, in different packaging, and watched most of it evaporate between Islamabad and the district account. The Area Development Secretariat will be judged not by what it is called or how it is legally structured, but by whether a father in Datta Khel can walk into a tehsil office, hand over a piece of paper, and get his phone to buzz two weeks later with news that something actually happened.
