Every few years, and lately every few months, a map goes viral. Pakistan carved into a dozen pieces: a South Punjab here, a Bahawalpur or Hazara there, Sindh split down the middle. The argument arrives in the reasonable, managerial voice of people who mean well. Our provinces are simply too big to govern. Punjab alone, at nearly 128 million, holds more people than all but eleven countries on earth. Break the giants into smaller units, the reasoning goes, and the state finally becomes that favourite word of our planners, “manageable”.
I understand the appeal. I also think it is one of the most expensive wrong answers we could give to a real question. Let me grant the diagnosis before I quarrel with the cure. A patient in Rajanpur and a bureaucrat in Lahore live in the same province and almost on different planets. The feeling in the peripheries that the capital hoards both money and attention is not paranoia. Something does have to change.
But start with how hard that road is. Our Constitution offers no clean mechanism for creating one. Article 239 speaks only of “altering the limits” of a province; carving a new one out of an old one needs two-thirds of the total membership of both houses of Parliament and of the assembly being divided. When will a Punjab Assembly run by a Lahore-centred elite vote to cut off its own southern half? When will a Sindh Assembly agree to a division most Sindhis read as an assault on Sindhi identity? We have walked into this wall already. A commission reported in 2013 for a Bahawalpur–South Punjab province. The amendment never came to a vote.
And suppose the wall came down. Every province drawn on an ethnic line invites the next drawn on a finer one. A Seraiki province breeds a Potohari claim; a Hazara province sharpens a Pashtun counter-claim; a divided Sindh reopens the urban-rural fault line we have spent decades trying to calm. New provinces do not dissolve identity politics. They institutionalise it, and give it a flag and a budget.
Here is what the map-makers keep missing. Our problem was never the number of provinces. It was that we stopped one storey too high. We fought for the 18th Amendment, moved power from Islamabad to the provinces, and then watched them hoard it exactly as the centre once hoarded from them. Article 140A commands every province to establish local government and hand it real political, administrative and financial authority. It sets no timetable, no formula and no penalty, so provinces obey it in form and defeat it in substance. Mayors, where they exist, are ornamental. In Punjab nobody has elected one since 2015; in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the councils’ terms ran out in March with none elected since. We devolved to Lahore and Karachi and called the job done.
Article 140A commands every province to establish local government and hand it real political, administrative and financial authority. It sets no timetable, no formula and no penalty, so provinces obey it in form and defeat it in substance.
So here is my proposal. Leave the four provinces exactly where they are, and build a real tier of government beneath them. Let each province be organised into a fixed set of administrative “states”, their boundaries written into the Constitution so no ruling party can redraw them. Sindh might have three, anchored on Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur; Punjab five; Balochistan three; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa four. Under each state a fixed number of districts and tehsils — a predictable ladder in place of the mess we rearrange with every regime. Gilgit-Baltistan stays outside this map, entangled with Kashmir, its Assembly having asked unanimously last month for provisional provincial status of its own.
Each state would elect its mayors, one to a district, and those mayors would choose a chief executive. A chief executive with a real budget, rather than one pleading for releases, can build a road, staff a hospital, hire a teacher and be voted out if he does not. That is accountability with a name and an address, which no provincial secretariat can offer.
But a mayor without a purse is a mayor in name, and we cannot fix the purse until we describe it correctly, because the popular account runs backwards. Almost nothing is raised locally. The federal government collects something like ninety-two rupees in every hundred; the provinces raise nearly all the rest; local governments raise so little the national accounts barely record it. It travels downward instead: from Islamabad to the provinces through the National Finance Commission, and from the provincial capital to the district through a Provincial Finance Commission nobody is obliged to convene. Balochistan’s has not met since 2008. Punjab’s last award was 2016. So the grievance is not that our money is siphoned upward. It is that it never finishes the journey down, stopping in the four cities where the cheques are signed.
That points to two repairs. The first is to settle a question we have never asked honestly: which taxes and duties raised in a district should stay there, and which raised in a province should stay with that province. Not as a slogan but as a worked-out schedule, so the money a place generates is visible to the people who live there and answerable for the schools, clinics, roads and buses they use. A district that keeps something of its own has a reason to collect it.
The second repair matters more, because retention on its own would enrich Karachi and starve Tharparkar. Article 160 protects the provinces from the centre, with a ratchet against any award cutting their share. Article 140A, meant to do the same work one storey lower, has none of that machinery. Write the Provincial Finance Commission into the Constitution on the model of the National one; fixed cycle, published formula, a floor that cannot be lowered and let the pooled portion run the other way, as equalisation. Retention rewards effort; the pool protects the poor district. The federal award itself is overdue: the one in force expired in 2015 and has been renewed by decree ever since, so a formula written for the Pakistan of 2010 still divides the money of 2026.
Push further still, into what makes this federal rather than merely decentralised: subsidiarity with teeth. A provincial legislature should not legislate on a matter internal to a state without the consent of a majority of that state’s mayors, and where it insists anyway, their collective view should bind it. Power stops trickling down when someone remembers. It rises only by consent. The province coordinates. It does not colonise.
Federalism is also about who reads the law, and here history has done half my work. The 27th Amendment moved constitutional cases out of the Supreme Court into a new Federal Constitutional Court last November. If that function now sits in one federal court, draw the honest conclusion: confine it to disputes between governments and questions touching the federation, and let ordinary civil and criminal appeals end in a supreme court of each province. A litigant in Sindh should find the end of the road in Karachi.
None of this is exotic. India met the same overload not by splitting its states but by writing panchayats and municipalities into its Constitution, with elections on a fixed cycle and a finance commission every five years to divide revenue downward on a settled formula rather than a minister’s whim. India keeps that promise only patchily. But the obligation is written down and can be enforced. Ours is not written down at all. Everywhere that governs well shares the same instinct: push authority and money down, not sideways.
I will not pretend the scheme is finished. The revenue schedule, the risk that empowered mayors harden into local despots, the arrangement Gilgit-Baltistan needs, all of it wants honest argument. Provincial supreme courts risk fragmenting the law, which is why the federal court must keep a narrow supervision. But the direction is right. It costs less than a fleet of new governors, it clears the wall of Article 239 that new provinces never will, and it cools identity politics instead of arming it.
We keep being sold a bigger map when what we need is a deeper one. Four provinces are enough. What Pakistan has never tried is giving an ordinary citizen a government within walking distance that actually holds the purse. Let us try that before we redraw the country again.