By: Dr. Zeeshan Qasim
There is a scene repeated every week in the tehsil offices of Dera Ghazi Khan, Rahim Yar Khan, Bahawalpur, Tank and Dera Ismail Khan. A farmer whose cotton crop has failed, or whose cattle have caught foot and mouth disease, or someone trying to resolve an issue with school, hospital, salary or pension, packs a bag, boards a bus at dawn and travels four or five hundred kilometres to Lahore or Peshawar, simply to have a file moved from one desk to another. He loses two days of wages, sleeps at a bus station or a cheap hotel, and often returns home with nothing more than a promise. This is not a failure of any one government. It is a failure of geography and scale, and it has gone on for seventy nine years.
Pakistan governs itself through four provinces built largely on the boundaries the British left behind, at a time when the population was a fraction of what it is today and the demands on the state were a fraction of what they are today. Punjab alone carries more than a hundred and thirty million people. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, swollen further by the merger of the former tribal districts, stretches from the Hindu Kush to the plains bordering Punjab. Balochistan spans nearly half the land area of the country with barely five per cent of its population, scattered across a landscape where a single district can be the size of a small European nation. No provincial capital, however well staffed, can see clearly across distances like these. The case for dividing the existing provinces into smaller, more manageable units is no longer a fringe idea. It is fast becoming the common sense of the country, and it is time political parties stopped treating it as a threat and started treating it as a duty.
This is felt most sharply in the districts furthest from the provincial capitals. Southern Punjab and southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa share a common complaint, even though they sit in different provinces. Their economies are built on cotton, mango, wheat, dates and livestock rather than the industrial and service economies of Lahore or Peshawar. Their roads, hospitals, colleges and irrigation schemes have historically received a smaller share of provincial budgets than the capital districts, because the capital sets the priorities and the capital is a long way from the fields. The demand for a South Punjab or Saraikistan province, comprising the Bahawalpur, Multan and Dera Ghazi Khan divisions, has been raised in parliament for over a decade now, and resolutions in its favour have already passed both the Punjab Assembly and the National Assembly. Bahawalpur, remember, was a princely state in its own right until 1955, with its own administration and its own identity, absorbed into West Pakistan only through the now abandoned One Unit scheme. Its people are not asking for something new. They are asking for the return of something they once had.
The scale of what has already been spent trying to approximate a province without actually creating one should embarrass anyone who calls the idea unaffordable. The South Punjab civil secretariat, set up in 2020 with an initial allocation of three and a half billion rupees, split its civil and police bureaucracies between Bahawalpur and Multan and now runs on a budget of over two and a half billion rupees a year, with a further seven billion rupees set aside in Punjab’s 2024-25 development programme just to construct permanent buildings for it and house its officers. That is real money spent to build a shadow province, staffed part time by secretaries who still answer to Lahore, in place of the full province the assemblies have already voted for. A proper province would not add this cost. It would simply let the money already being spent do the job it was meant to do.
The same is true further north. The Hazara Division of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, home to a majority Hindko speaking population quite distinct linguistically and culturally from the Pashtun belt around it, has campaigned for a separate province since 1957. The KP Assembly itself has passed unanimous resolutions in support of a Hazara province on repeated occasions, most recently reaffirming the demand at the end of last year. When a provincial assembly agrees unanimously, across party lines, that part of its own territory should be allowed to leave, that is not agitation. That is consensus asking to be honoured.
Move further west and the argument becomes still sharper. The mineral wealth of the former tribal districts and of Balochistan, copper, gold, coal, natural gas, is administered from Peshawar and Quetta, cities that in some cases are further from the resource site than Islamabad is. Policy on Reko Diq or on the gas fields of Sui is decided by officials who may never have set foot in the district concerned. Balochistan’s grievances, rooted in a sparse population spread over vast desert and mountain, a distinct set of tribal and ethnic structures, and decades of feeling that its resources leave the province faster than its development arrives, are simply not the same grievances as those of a Pashtun farmer in Swat or Peshawar. Governing both through a single provincial machinery, and asking a single bureaucracy trained largely in the norms of the settled districts to understand both, has not worked. Smaller units, closer to the people and their particular economy, crops and customs, would allow administrators to actually know the ground they are ruling rather than read about it in a file.
None of this would make Pakistan an outlier. It would simply be catching up with a pattern seen across the world. India began independence with a patchwork of British provinces and princely states and, through the States Reorganisation Act of 1956, restructured itself into fourteen states built primarily along linguistic lines. It did not stop there. Maharashtra and Gujarat were separated in 1960. Haryana was carved from Punjab in 1966. Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand were created together in 2000 specifically to bring governance closer to underdeveloped regions of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Telangana was separated from Andhra Pradesh as recently as 2014. Today India governs a population roughly six times that of Pakistan through twenty eight states and eight union territories, each small enough that its chief minister can plausibly know his own districts. Nigeria offers a similar lesson on this side of the world, having grown from three regions at independence to thirty six states today, precisely because a handful of enormous regions proved too crude an instrument to manage the country’s ethnic and economic diversity. Even Iraq and Ethiopia have redrawn internal boundaries in recent decades to bring administration nearer to distinct populations. The pattern across every large and diverse federation is the same, and as population grows and grievances sharpen, the answer has been smaller units, not larger ones.
If the logic is this well established elsewhere, the question is why Pakistan keeps stalling on its own doorstep. The honest answer is that the decision has been left in the hands of political parties, and every time the idea of new provinces surfaces, it becomes a bargaining chip between coalition partners, a slogan for one election and a threat withdrawn the next. A special committee is formed, as one was in December 2022 for South Punjab, and the report is quietly shelved. This is precisely why the decision should be taken out of the hands of party leadership and put directly to the people who would live in these new provinces. A referendum, conducted district by district under the supervision of the Election Commission, would let the residents of Hazara, of South Punjab, of the merged districts and of Balochistan’s constituent regions decide their own administrative future without a party leader in Islamabad deciding it for them first. The Constitution already provides a mechanism, under Article 239, for provincial assemblies to move resolutions towards this end, and both the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assemblies have already done so. What is missing is the political will in the centre to convert consensus at the provincial level into constitutional fact, free of the horse trading that has killed this idea more than once before.
Some in the centre fear that smaller provinces mean a weaker federation. The opposite is closer to the truth. A grievance that festers because no one in power understands it is far more dangerous to the federation than a new province with its own assembly and its own chief minister. Smaller units bring bureaucracy physically and psychologically closer to the citizen, cut the travel time for basic services from days to hours, and allow the National Finance Commission to allocate resources against the real needs of a region rather than against an average blurred across a hundred million people.
There is also an economic case that deserves far more attention than it has received. A structure of smaller provinces, each with the constitutional room to set its own supplementary taxation and investment incentives within the existing federal framework, would allow a mineral rich region to build its own revenue base rather than wait for a share to be transferred down from a distant capital, and would allow an agricultural region to design tax relief suited to farming rather than to a provincial budget written with an industrial city in mind. A calibrated, province specific approach to taxation, still within the bounds of the constitution and the NFC award, would let each new unit compete for investment on its own terms and keep more of the wealth it generates within reach of the people who generate it. Over time this narrows rather than widens the gap between a wealthy and a poor province, because it gives every region a direct stake in growing its own economy instead of a permanent excuse to blame the centre. The sense of desperation that comes from watching resources flow out of a poor region into a richer one, or watching a policy written for Lahore imposed unaltered on Multan, is itself a threat to national unity. Removing that desperation strengthens the federation far more than any amount of centralisation ever has.
Pakistan was built as a federation of provinces, not a federation of one province and three afterthoughts. Seventy nine years on, the honest and overdue step is to let its administrative map catch up with its population, its economy and its people’s patience.
The debate over new provinces touches deep questions of identity, resource distribution and political power in Pakistan, and reasonable people disagree sharply on where new boundaries should fall, who should draw them, and whether the country can afford the constitutional and administrative cost of the exercise. Opponents warn that carving up existing provinces could inflame rather than settle ethnic and linguistic rivalries, strain an already stretched federal budget with the cost of new secretariats and assemblies, and be exploited by political parties for short term electoral gain rather than genuine reform. Critics of a referendum route also point out that the Constitution assigns the power to create provinces to Parliament and the relevant provincial assembly, not to a public vote, so any referendum would need to work alongside, not instead of, that process. These are serious objections, and any government moving on this question will need to answer them directly rather than assume the case is settled.
