Pakistan’s debate over new provinces has remained trapped for too long in questions of ethnicity, language, political turf and provincial identity. These concerns cannot simply be dismissed, but they have obscured the more consequential issue: whether a country of Pakistan’s demographic scale and complexity can continue to be governed effectively through a provincial structure in which political, administrative and fiscal authority is concentrated in a handful of capitals. The real question is therefore larger than where provincial boundaries should be drawn. It is whether Pakistan can use provincial reorganisation as an opportunity to redesign the relationship between the citizen and the state.
That would require more manageable administrative units where necessary, meaningful political and fiscal devolution, empowered local governments, a fundamentally reformed civil service and a leaner state that enables economic activity rather than expanding itself as an employer. Provincialisation, in this conception, becomes not an end but an instrument of institutional reform. The case for additional provinces should therefore rest primarily upon governability: bringing administration closer to citizens, reducing excessive concentration of authority, improving accountability and allowing development priorities to reflect local needs more effectively.
Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta inevitably exercise enormous gravitational pull over their respective provincial systems. The farther citizens live from these centres, the greater the risk that government becomes remote, inaccessible and unresponsive. A federation should bring government closer to its people. Ours too often does the opposite. Properly conceived, creating stronger and more manageable administrative units need not weaken the federation. It could strengthen it by distributing authority more evenly, improving representation and making government more responsive. The objective is not fragmentation. It is governability. But decentralisation cannot simply mean multiplying governments and bureaucracies. It must proceed alongside hard-hitting civil-service reform, greater accountability and institutional efficiency. Otherwise, Pakistan risks replacing a few huge white elephants with many baby elephants and ultimately carrying an even heavier burden. This is why lean government must become an integral part of the argument.
In the modern economy, government should not measure its success by the number of departments it operates or people it employs. New administrative units must not become vehicles for expanding public payrolls or creating large organisations merely for the sake of generating jobs. The proper role of government is to provide efficient administration, rule of law, infrastructure, predictable regulation, human development and an environment in which enterprise can flourish. Sustainable employment should come principally from economic growth—from industry, investment, entrepreneurship, technology and innovation producing diverse opportunities. A successful state should therefore be judged less by how many people it directly employs than by how effectively it enables citizens and businesses to create wealth and jobs.
The principle should precede the map. Pakistan needs administrative units sufficiently large to be economically and institutionally viable, but sufficiently manageable to be governed effectively.
Pakistan’s Constitution already provides a democratic route for altering provincial boundaries. Article 239(4) requires that a constitutional amendment altering the limits of a province secure approval from not less than two-thirds of the total membership of the affected Provincial Assembly before it can be presented to the President for assent. This is an important safeguard. Provincial reorganisation cannot simply be imposed from Islamabad. It requires substantial political consent within the province concerned. The constitutional threshold is demanding, but not insurmountable. It rightly requires negotiation and political consensus rather than executive fiat. The more formidable obstacle is political economy.
Established structures rarely volunteer to surrender territory, patronage, fiscal resources or administrative control. Provincial capitals accumulate bureaucracies, contracts, institutions and political influence. Redrawing administrative boundaries inevitably redistributes some of that power. Resistance should therefore surprise no one. But institutional resistance cannot become a permanent argument against reform. There comes a point when the scale and concentration of government themselves become impediments to effective government. Development priorities should not depend upon proximity to a provincial capital or access to a provincial elite. Additional administrative centres can help correct such distortions—but only if they are designed differently from the institutions they replace.
That qualification is fundamental. If Pakistan merely subdivides existing provinces while reproducing the same bureaucratic hierarchy, patronage structures, administrative culture and centralisation within the successor units, provincialisation will fail. We would simply exchange several large centralised governments for a greater number of smaller centralised governments—more governors, ministers, secretariats, official residences and public expenditure without necessarily producing better services.
Pakistan therefore confronts an apparent catch-22. Should civil-service reform come first, with provincialisation following once the machinery of government has been repaired? Or should new provinces be created first and their administrations reformed afterwards? We have already lost too much time for either sequential approach. Waiting for comprehensive civil-service reform before provincial reorganisation could mean another decade of commissions, reports and recommendations. Yet creating new provinces first and hoping to reform their bureaucracies later risks institutionalising the very structures we are trying to escape.
The two must become one reform project. Indeed, provincial reorganisation could provide the deadline and institutional catalyst that civil-service reform has repeatedly lacked. A newly created province presents a rare opportunity to design institutions before vested interests, hierarchies and entitlements become entrenched.
Its administrative architecture should therefore be built from the ground up. Which departments are genuinely necessary? Which functions belong at provincial level and which should be transferred to divisions, districts or elected local governments? How many officials are required? Which services can be digitised? How should procurement be made transparent? How can performance be measured? What revenue base will sustain the new administration? These questions should be answered before the first government takes office.
A new province should be lean by design, not a miniature reproduction of the bureaucracy from which it emerged. It should reduce unnecessary hierarchy, eliminate duplication, strengthen merit in recruitment and promotion, establish reasonable security of tenure, digitise citizen services and hold officials accountable against measurable outcomes. Civil servants should be protected from arbitrary political interference while remaining accountable for performance. Ministers should determine policy; professional officials should administer it. Transfers and postings should cease to function as instruments of patronage, reward and punishment. But civil-service reform must go deeper than organisational charts. Pakistan inherited a culture of public office in which authority is too often expressed through status: convoys, protocol, oversized offices, privileged access, ceremonial deference and an institutional obsession with rank. These are not merely cosmetic. They reinforce a relationship in which the citizen approaches the state as a supplicant rather than as the person whom the state exists to serve.
The power, prestige and pomp of public office must therefore be deliberately reduced. Privilege should follow function, not rank. Authority should bring greater accountability, not greater entitlement. The prestige of an official should derive from competence, integrity and service rather than from the size of an office, residence or convoy. The objective must be to move from a ruling bureaucracy to a serving bureaucracy to take the “power” out of public office and put the power into public service. Yet even smaller provinces and a reformed civil service will not by themselves constitute genuine devolution. If authority merely moves from Lahore or Karachi to another provincial capital, Pakistan will have decentralised one tier while preserving centralisation at the next. Schools, municipal services, basic healthcare, local infrastructure and appropriate regulatory and policing functions should increasingly be administered where people actually live.
Elected local governments require constitutional continuity, meaningful political authority, predictable fiscal resources and professional administrative capacity. A redesigned state must therefore be flatter as well as smaller: power should flow downward from federation to province and from province to district and locality. Fiscal architecture is equally important. New provinces must begin with transparent arrangements governing revenues, expenditures, assets and liabilities, natural resources and public employees. Fiscal discipline must be embedded from the beginning if provincialisation is to create leaner government rather than simply additional claims upon the public purse. Pakistan should also avoid becoming trapped prematurely in arguments over precisely how many provinces it requires. Geography, population, economic viability, administrative accessibility, historical identities and public consent should inform the process. An independent Provincial and Administrative Reform Commission could develop objective criteria and evaluate competing proposals.
The principle should precede the map. Pakistan needs administrative units sufficiently large to be economically and institutionally viable, but sufficiently manageable to be governed effectively. Boundaries should not acquire permanent sanctity merely because history left them where they are. Administrative structures exist for citizens; citizens do not exist to preserve administrative structures. Nor should provincialisation become another exercise in distributing political offices. Each new administrative unit should enter existence with defined five-year performance benchmarks covering education, healthcare, policing, revenue mobilisation, infrastructure, investment, ease of doing business and citizen access to government. Its economic success should be measured not by the size of its bureaucracy but by the opportunities its governance creates outside that bureaucracy.
Seen this way, the case for new provinces is only one component of a much larger proposition. Pakistan has spent decades attempting to govern an increasingly complex society through structures that remain excessively centralised, hierarchical and remote. Provincial reorganisation offers an unusual opportunity not simply to divide those structures, but to replace their underlying administrative logic. Pakistan has already lost too much time waiting for one reform to make another possible. Civil-service reform should neither precede provincialisation indefinitely nor follow it as an afterthought. Devolution, administrative restructuring, fiscal reform and civil-service transformation must move together.
The creation of new provinces should therefore be conditional not merely upon drawing their boundaries, but upon designing their administrative DNA before their first governments take office. That DNA should embody lean government, professional and accountable public service, empowered local institutions, fiscal discipline and an economic philosophy in which the state creates the conditions for opportunity rather than attempting to manufacture employment through bureaucracy. If Pakistan can achieve that, provincial reorganisation would become far more than an exercise in redrawing a map. It could become a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redesign the state itself.