(Abdul Basit Alvi)
Pakistan’s more than 240 million people are spread across a vast and geographically diverse territory, yet governance remains concentrated in only four provinces, each responsible for more than 60 million people. This makes provincial administration distant and overburdened, particularly in Punjab, where more than half the population is governed from Lahore despite the distance from Dera Ghazi Khan, Bahawalpur, Sialkot, and other peripheral areas. Citizens in remote regions often face long, costly journeys to provincial capitals for documentation, land disputes, specialized healthcare, and other services; people in Chitral may struggle to reach Peshawar, while coastal communities in Balochistan may travel hundreds of miles to Quetta and face linguistic and cultural barriers. Such administrative distance can create perceptions of neglect and unequal resource distribution, leaving peripheral communities without adequate water, schools, healthcare, and other services and potentially contributing to separatism and instability. India demonstrates the potential of greater administrative decentralization through its 36 states, provinces, and union territories despite its much larger population and territory, while Pakistan’s One Unit experiment of 1955–1970 illustrates the dangers of excessive centralization and ignoring regional identities. The proposed solution is therefore to evolve Pakistan’s provincial structure by creating smaller, more accessible administrative units rather than treating the existing four provinces as permanent.
The most practical approach is to upgrade existing administrative divisions into provinces, using their established headquarters, government offices, police, courts, and development institutions as the foundations of new provincial governments. Multan, for example, already has a civil secretariat, high court bench, police headquarters, and other departments, so it could be developed into a provincial capital without the enormous cost of building entirely new secretariats, universities, hospitals, housing, and other infrastructure. This would reduce financial pressure, minimize disruption, and allow authority to move closer to citizens. New provinces could create provincial governments, assemblies, ministries, courts, police institutions, and thousands of jobs, attract professionals, reduce migration to overcrowded cities, improve law enforcement through locally familiar police forces, and stimulate construction, transportation, hospitality, supply businesses, and other small and medium enterprises. However, restructuring must be accompanied by comprehensive governance reform because corruption and financial leakages—including embezzlement, favoritism, bribery, ghost employees, inflated contracts, fraudulent welfare payments, and electricity and water theft—can undermine the entire project. The cited audit findings of more than Rs40 billion allegedly embezzled from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government accounts and Rs25 billion allegedly siphoned from the Benazir Income Support Programme demonstrate the seriousness of the problem. Weak taxation and electricity-sector losses further reduce state revenue, increase borrowing, and limit development capacity, so new provinces must be supported by independent anti-corruption bodies, digitized government finances and verifiable audit trails, transparent merit-based recruitment, stronger accountability, and a comprehensive overhaul of tax collection so citizens and businesses contribute their fair share.
The creation of provinces should be guided strictly by national interest, with population size and geographical contiguity as the principal criteria rather than language, ethnicity, tribe, or sect, so that administrative reform strengthens rather than fragments Pakistan. The argument warns that identity-based provincial politics can intensify ethnic and linguistic divisions, drawing on Pakistan’s history of conflict associated with identity politics and noting that provinces such as Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have historically been linked to linguistic and ethnic identities. New provinces should instead be diverse, pluralistic, and inclusive administrative and development units in which no ethnic or linguistic group claims exclusive ownership; regional cultures and languages should be preserved, but within a broader civic Pakistani identity in which provinces are viewed as branches of one national state rather than separate homelands. Political parties are urged to treat provincial reform as a national structural necessity rather than an electoral bargaining tool, because past governments have repeatedly used the issue to reward supporters, punish opponents, gain votes, or avoid disturbing existing power structures. The proposed reform requires political statesmanship that puts citizens’ interests above partisan calculations. The people themselves, including communities in Hazara, Saraiki-speaking southern Punjab, Bahawalpur, and various parts of Balochistan, are seeking greater administrative representation, resources, autonomy, and participation. Responding to these aspirations through carefully designed, geographically and demographically viable provinces could improve representation and development, demonstrate genuine commitment to state reform, restore public trust, and strengthen Pakistan’s unity by bringing government closer to its citizens while maintaining an overarching national identity.
The creation of new provinces in Pakistan is not a luxury that the country can afford to postpone or a whimsical idea that can be dismissed lightly, but rather a fundamental and indispensable reform that is essential for the long-term health, stability, and prosperity of the nation, and it is a reform whose time has definitively come. The current four-province structure is a relic of the past, a colonial-era administrative convenience that is completely inadequate to address the complex challenges of a twenty-first-century nation of over two hundred and forty million people, and its continuation is a primary cause of the inefficiency, inequality, and alienation that plague the country. The conversion of existing divisions into provinces offers a practical, low-cost, and readily implementable solution that leverages existing infrastructure and avoids the fiscal burden of building new state structures from scratch, making it a prudent and intelligent policy choice. The creation of new provinces will not only improve governance and administrative efficiency but will also generate a significant number of new jobs and economic opportunities, providing a much-needed boost to regional economies and offering new prospects for the country’s burgeoning youth population. At the same time, this structural reform must be accompanied by a sustained and resolute effort to eradicate corruption and plug the financial leakages that drain the public treasury, as these resources are the lifeblood of the new provinces and are essential for funding the development projects that will transform the lives of the people. The principles of demarcation must be based on population and geography, with a steadfast refusal to allow language or ethnicity to become the defining characteristics of the new units, in order to ensure that these provinces become symbols of national unity and not sources of further division. The political parties must rise above their petty rivalries and act with a sense of collective responsibility, recognizing that the creation of new provinces is a national cause that transcends party lines, and the government must have the courage and the resolve to move forward with this agenda, confident in the knowledge that the people of Pakistan will embrace this decision as a historic step towards a stronger, more prosperous, and more just nation. The path forward is clear, the arguments are compelling, and the time for action is now, for in the creation of new provinces lies the key to unlocking Pakistan’s immense potential and ensuring a brighter future for all its citizens, a future where governance is not a distant and abstract concept but a tangible, responsive, and empowering reality for every man, woman, and child in the country.
