The writer is an economist, anchor, jurist, geopolitical analyst and the President of All Pakistan Private Schools’ Federation
president@Pakistanprivateschools.com
As the debate over carving out new provinces in Pakistan reignites, before this decision, it should be made clear to the nation why new provinces are necessary and on what model they will be formed. A National Policy debate and Public Questions for Evidence-Based Debate: Pakistan has reached a point where the question of new provinces can no longer be treated merely as an electoral slogan, a regional demand or a political bargaining chip. If the country is going to reconsider its provincial structure, the exercise must be approached as a once-in-a-generation state-building project. The real question is not simply: How many provinces should Pakistan have? The more important question is: What provincial system can Pakistan afford, govern and sustain for the next 50 to 100 years? Yet where, in Pakistan’s case, is the national survey and complete roadmap? Has the public been meaningfully consulted? On what objective criteria of identity, geography, and viability will provincial boundaries be drawn? What exact constitutional procedure will be followed, and where is the detailed financial model for each proposed entity—including the one-time establishment costs, the permanent rise in governmental expenditure, the formula for distributing assets, debts and employees, the future functioning of the NFC Award, the safety net for any fiscally weak province, and the determination of rights over water and natural resources? How will real powers actually devolve to districts and cities, what tangible benefits will the ordinary citizen gain, and how will governance and accountability improve rather than fragment further? Until these questions are answered with transparency and intellectual honesty, any talk of new provinces risks remaining an exercise in rhetoric rather than responsible statecraft. No such radical redrawing of the map has ever succeeded without rigorous research, exhaustive public consultation, meticulous financial modelling, precise boundary delineation, constitutional legislation, and the painstaking transfer of an entire administrative system. Pakistan’s population, urban centres, economic geography, administrative requirements and public-service expectations have changed dramatically since 1973. Yet the basic provincial structure remains largely unchanged. At the same time, the Constitution itself recognises both provincial autonomy and the need for political, administrative and financial devolution to elected local governments. The international experience also teaches an important lesson: a province is not created merely by drawing a line on a map. Boundaries, institutions, finances, employees, assets, liabilities, natural resources, courts, police, taxation, infrastructure and intergovernmental relations must all be planned. India’s States Reorganisation Commission was established in December 1953 and reported in 1955 after extensive examination and consultation. The Indian government continues to preserve the Commission’s report as a major institutional record of the reorganisation process. South Africa’s transition from its previous territorial structure to nine provinces was embedded in a constitutional transition rather than accomplished as a simple administrative notification. The 1993 Interim Constitution established nine provinces, while subsequent constitutional arrangements provided mechanisms for dealing with the practical consequences of territorial changes. The United Kingdom’s devolution experience likewise demonstrates the importance of policy papers, consultation, legislation and institutional preparation. The Scotland devolution process included a White Paper and parliamentary legislation before the new institutional structure was established. Pakistan should therefore learn from these experiences—not copy them mechanically. The argument for new provinces should not begin with ethnicity, language or political representation alone. It should begin with governance. A province becomes relevant when its existing administrative scale makes it difficult to: deliver education and healthcare; administer justice; manage police and public safety; maintain roads and infrastructure; collect taxes; regulate cities; manage agriculture and water; respond quickly to disasters; create employment; attract investment; supervise districts; and bring government closer to citizens. A citizen should not have to travel hundreds of kilometres simply to access a provincial institution. At the same time, creating another provincial capital does not automatically solve this problem. If the same concentration of power is simply transferred from Lahore to another city, Pakistan may end up creating smaller versions of the same centralized governance problem. Therefore, the debate must have two dimensions: New Provinces along with empowered Local Governments. The first without the second may merely reproduce centralisation at a smaller scale. There is no universal rule of international law requiring a country to create a particular number of provinces or states. The organisation of internal administrative units remains primarily a matter of each state’s constitutional order. However, international human-rights law establishes principles highly relevant to the process. Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognises citizens’ right and opportunity to participate in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives, and to have equal access to public service. Article 26 further establishes equality before the law and equal protection against discrimination, including discrimination based on language or national and social origin. The UN Sustainable Development Goals reinforce the same governance philosophy. SDG 16 calls for effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels, responsive and participatory decision-making, access to justice and the rule of law. This provides an important policy principle for Pakistan: Administrative reorganisation should expand citizens’ effective participation and access to government—not merely rearrange political power among elites. The creation of a new province is fundamentally a constitutional exercise. Article 239 provides the constitutional amendment procedure. A constitutional amendment bill generally requires a two-thirds majority of the total membership of each House of Parliament. More importantly, where an amendment would alter the limits of a province, Article 239(4) requires the approval of the concerned Provincial Assembly by at least two-thirds of its total membership before presidential assent. This means that the creation of a new province cannot legitimately be reduced to: an executive notification; a cabinet announcement; a political speech; or a unilateral federal decision. It requires a constitutional pathway. That constitutional requirement is not an obstacle to reform. It is a constitutional safeguard for reform. There is another constitutional provision that must be placed at the centre of this debate. Article 140A requires each province to establish a local-government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to elected local-government representatives. This has a profound implication. If Pakistan creates six, eight or twelve provinces but leaves districts, cities and municipalities dependent upon provincial capitals for basic decisions, the fundamental governance problem may remain. Therefore, the objective should not be more provinces. The objective should be “government closer to citizens. A serious reform programme should therefore combine: Federal Government; Provinces; Regions; Divisions; Districts; Cities; Municipalities; Union and Local Councils with clearly defined functions and revenue sources. The creation of any new province in Pakistan hinges foremost on the intricate architecture of fiscal federalism under Article 160, which charges the National Finance Commission with determining the equitable distribution of revenues, grants-in-aid, and borrowing powers between the Federation and the Provinces. Far from a mere administrative exercise, this demands a rigorous, forward-looking fiscal model for every proposed entity—one that meticulously evaluates population dynamics, own-source revenues from taxes, fees, and royalties, anticipated federal transfers, recurrent and development expenditures, inherited debt, institutional start-up costs, structural fiscal gaps, underlying economic potential across agriculture, industry, services, and minerals, and the equalization support required for weaker regions. The decisive question, therefore, is not whether another province can simply be carved out, but whether it can be designed to remain fiscally self-sustaining and responsible across the next half-century. This imperative gives rise to a more refined vision: the Smart and Fiscally Autonomous Province, founded on progressive revenue responsibility, disciplined expenditure that rejects bureaucratic excess in favour of lean e-governance, digital systems, and data-driven public services, performance-based administration with measurable targets, and uncompromising financial accountability that renders every rupee traceable from budget to outcome.
Pakistan stands at a rare institutional crossroads. The renewed discussion on creating new provinces is no longer a peripheral slogan or a regional bargaining chip; it has become a fundamental question of how the state itself will be structured for the next fifty to one hundred years. Population growth, urban expansion, economic geography, and citizens’ expectations of public services have transformed the country far beyond the provincial map inherited in 1973. Yet any decision to redraw that map must begin not with ethnicity, language, or electoral calculation, but with a clear-eyed assessment of governance capacity, fiscal sustainability, constitutional process, and the practical ability to bring the state closer to the citizen. The real test is whether new provinces can deliver better education, healthcare, justice, policing, infrastructure, and economic opportunity—or whether they will simply multiply the same centralised problems at a smaller scale. Drawing upon the measured wisdom of international experience, Pakistan would do well to recognise that enduring territorial reform is never a matter of cartographic impulse alone, but of deliberate institutional craftsmanship. India’s States Reorganisation Commission of 1953–55, led by Justice S. Fazal Ali, demonstrated the indispensable value of first establishing an independent expert body charged with objective inquiry, public consultation, and the publication of reasoned recommendations before any legislative step is taken. South Africa’s 1994 constitutional transformation similarly revealed that the redrawing of boundaries into nine provinces succeeded only because it was accompanied by the meticulous integration of institutions, policing arrangements, and intergovernmental mechanisms, underpinned by explicit legislation governing the transfer of functions, assets, rights, and liabilities—a principle Pakistan should enshrine through a dedicated Transition Act rather than a mere constitutional amendment. South Africa’s 1994 transition reorganised the country’s territorial structure into nine provinces as part of a wider constitutional transformation. The process was not limited to drawing new boundaries. Government institutions, policing arrangements, provincial structures and intergovernmental mechanisms had to be integrated. The South African constitutional framework also explicitly contemplated legislation dealing with the practical consequences of changing provincial boundaries, including functions, assets, rights, obligations, duties and liabilities. Pakistan should adopt this principle: Every boundary change must have a Transition Act—not merely a constitutional amendment. The United Kingdom’s approach to Scottish devolution further underscores that genuine restructuring demands a sequenced architecture of white papers, public consultation, carefully designed legislation, institutional preparation, fiscal frameworks, clearly delineated powers, and a transparent transition timetable. The UK government produced a White Paper and parliamentary legislation before establishing the devolved Scottish Parliament. Together these precedents counsel that any reconfiguration of Pakistan’s provincial map must be preceded by rigorous evidence-gathering, inclusive deliberation, and the prior construction of durable institutional and fiscal scaffolding if it is to command legitimacy and endure. The lesson is that constitutional restructuring should be accompanied by: policy papers; public consultation; legislative design; institutional preparation; fiscal arrangements; defined powers; and a transition timetable. Pakistan must forge its own distinctive path rather than transplanting India’s linguistic template, South Africa’s transitional architecture, or Britain’s devolutionary design, crafting instead a hybrid model in which no single criterion—whether language, historical identity, or popular sentiment—prevails in isolation, but is carefully balanced against geography, population scale, economic viability, administrative accessibility, natural-resource endowment, public preference, and constitutional consensus. To give this principle institutional form, the state should first constitute an independent National Administrative and Provincial Review Commission, deliberately insulated from partisan dominance and composed of constitutional lawyers, economists, public-finance specialists, demographers, geographers, urban planners, water and natural-resource experts, statisticians, local-government practitioners, representatives of the Election Commission, the Council of Common Interests and the Finance Division, together with provincial and civil-society voices, charged with a time-bound mandate of eighteen to twenty-four months and required to place its findings in the public domain. Only thereafter should the nation be presented with a comprehensive National Provincial Reorganisation White Paper that, for every proposed province, sets out a rigorous demographic, territorial, economic, fiscal, resource, human-development and governance profile, quantifies transition costs and the division of assets and liabilities, and charts a precise, phased roadmap from Year 0 to full institutional maturity—thereby ensuring that any reconfiguration of the federation rests on evidence, deliberation and enduring administrative coherence rather than impulse.Before any irreversible step toward provincial reorganisation is contemplated, the Government of Pakistan must confront, with candour and intellectual rigour, a series of foundational questions that together constitute the indispensable national audit of readiness. Has an independent, high-level technical commission been formally constituted to examine the matter, and if so, by whom, with what qualified membership, under what precise mandate, and with what publicly available data and reports—or, if no such body exists, on what evidentiary foundation are serious proposals for new provinces even being advanced? Has genuine, inclusive consultation been undertaken—not through isolated political gatherings but through systematic engagement with citizens, elected representatives, universities, chambers of commerce, civil society, professional communities, local governments, political parties, youth, women, minorities, and the diaspora—supported, ideally, by a transparent digital portal that invites structured responses on the desirability of reorganisation, the criteria that should govern it, the regions requiring greater autonomy, viable boundaries, economic concerns, and accompanying local-government reforms? Will boundaries be determined by language, ethnicity, or historical identity alone, or by a carefully weighted synthesis of all relevant factors in which administrative and economic viability are never subordinated, and will an independent Boundary and Economic Viability Commission first publish objective criteria? Has the constitutional pathway been clearly mapped and publicly explained—progressing deliberately from research and consultation through a White Paper, political consensus, the required two-thirds majorities in the relevant Provincial Assembly, National Assembly and Senate, presidential assent, a dedicated Transition Act, and phased implementation—rather than leaping from announcement to cartographic fait accompli and potential constitutional crisis? And, finally, does every proposed province rest upon a transparent thirty-year fiscal projection that discloses its revenue capacity, expenditure profile, NFC dependence, borrowing trajectory, and realistic prospect of progressive self-reliance? Only when these questions are answered with evidence, openness, and institutional seriousness can any reconfiguration of the federation claim legitimacy. Any serious contemplation of provincial reorganisation must confront, with equal gravity, the fiscal and institutional consequences that will determine whether the new entities endure as viable members of the federation or become permanent drains upon it. Because Article 160 vests the National Finance Commission with the constitutional responsibility for recommending the distribution of revenues and grants between the Federation and the Provinces, the redesign of territorial boundaries and the recalibration of intergovernmental fiscal arrangements must be studied as a single, indivisible exercise. For provinces that may initially prove financially fragile, an Equalisation and Fiscal Responsibility Framework should provide a carefully calibrated safety net—conditional upon transparent accounting, revenue mobilisation, expenditure discipline, service-delivery targets, audit compliance, debt ceilings and measurable reforms—thereby avoiding the moral hazard of open-ended bailouts. Before any boundary is drawn, the full one-time establishment costs—assembly, secretariat, courts, police headquarters, offices, digital systems, residences, transport, recruitment and infrastructure—must be independently audited and publicly disclosed, just as the permanent annual burden of governors, cabinets, assemblies, departments, pensions, policing and bureaucracy must be rigorously projected so that the creation of a province never becomes a pretext for governmental inflation. Finally, a legally binding Asset, Liability and Human Resource Transition Framework—covering land, buildings, corporations, debt, pensions, employees, records and contracts—must be settled in advance, drawing instructive precedent from South Africa’s constitutional insistence that every change of provincial boundaries be accompanied by clear rules governing the transfer of functions, assets, rights, obligations and liabilities. Only through such integrated fiscal foresight can reorganisation claim both legitimacy and sustainability. No provincial boundary should ever be drawn until the allocation of water, river systems, dams, hydropower, hydrocarbons, minerals, royalties, forests, irrigation networks and shared infrastructure has first been settled with legal clarity and inter-provincial equity, lest today’s administrative convenience become tomorrow’s constitutional conflict. Equally decisive is the recognition that genuine devolution must reach beyond the provincial capital: Article 140A already obliges provinces to establish robust local-government systems and to transfer political, administrative and financial authority to elected representatives, so that the proper model becomes Province plus Strong Local Government rather than Province plus Expanded Secretariat—empowering districts with defined functions and predictable revenues, cities with elected mayors, and municipalities with clear authority over sanitation, local roads, water supply, building regulation, transport, waste management, parks, local taxation and urban planning.
Pakistan already possesses the constitutional tools—Articles 239, 160, and 140A—and the international principles of participation, equality, and accountable institutions under SDG 16. What remains is the political will to use them properly. If the nation proceeds with evidence rather than expediency, with strong local governments rather than merely smaller provincial capitals, and with a fifty-to-one-hundred-year horizon rather than the next election cycle, then provincial reorganization can become an instrument of genuine national development; it needs a provincial system designed for the citizens of 2100 and beyond.
Pakistan’s gravest risk in any provincial reorganisation is the substitution of more government for better government—an error already familiar from the discontinuities of One Unit and successive local-government experiments, where the absence of constitutional protection, transparent legislation, institutional independence, objective performance metrics, permanent fiscal rules, public reporting and broad political consensus allowed successive administrations to dismantle what their predecessors had built. Equally perilous is the prospect that new provincial capitals merely replicate centralised decision-making, leaving distant districts untouched; true reform therefore demands simultaneous devolution inside the province, embedding strong elected local governments so that power genuinely approaches the citizen rather than accumulating in another oversized secretariat. The model Pakistan requires—Smart Province 2050—must be constitutionally secure, administratively manageable, economically viable, fiscally responsible, digitally governed, locally empowered, culturally inclusive yet non-exclusionary, rigorously accountable, climate- and demographically sustainable, and consciously intergenerational. The ultimate measure of success must be the tangible improvement in the life of the ordinary citizen, tracked through transparent indicators of distance to public offices, speed of land-record and business services, police response times, school attendance, hospital access, permit processing and court accessibility. To prevent governance failure, every new province should be bound from inception by independent audit, fiscal-responsibility rules, debt ceilings, performance contracts, digital procurement, open budget data, citizen complaint mechanisms, annual performance reporting, early-warning fiscal systems and rigorous legislative oversight. Yet the publicly available record does not presently demonstrate that Pakistan has completed—or even formally begun—the comprehensive, nationwide technical exercise that these imperatives demand. While parliamentary and political activity surrounding the question of new provinces has indeed accumulated over several years—ranging from the Senate Standing Committee on Law and Justice’s decision in February 2022 to hold public hearings on South Punjab and Bahawalpur, through its subsequent consideration of constitutional amendment bills for Bahawalpur, South Punjab and Hazara, its January 2025 referral of a South Punjab proposal to the Ministry of Law and Justice for a comprehensive constitutional, financial and historical appraisal, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly’s unanimous December 2025 resolution calling for a Hazara Province, concurrent political efforts to build national consensus and demand a formal commission, and the PPP Central Executive Committee’s reported July 2026 deliberations stressing the necessity of constitutional rather than executive processes—such activity must be carefully distinguished from the completion of a rigorous national technical exercise. The existence of bills, committee deliberations, provincial resolutions and political consultations, however earnest, does not yet constitute evidence that Pakistan has undertaken a National Administrative and Provincial Reorganisation Commission, a nationwide survey, detailed economic-viability studies, a comprehensive White Paper, an asset-and-liability framework, NFC simulations or a sequenced transition plan. Should any such comprehensive body of work now exist within the federal government, democratic accountability requires that it be publicly identified and its findings released without delay. What the Government of Pakistan must now undertake is a disciplined, multi-phased national process rather than another cycle of political announcement. Phase I, lasting six months, should consist of a rigorous nationwide administrative review examining population distribution, geography, travel distances, service-delivery gaps, economic activity, natural resources, poverty patterns, urbanisation trends, governance capacity and fiscal strength. Phase II, spanning twelve months, would establish an independent National Administrative and Provincial Review Commission whose findings are placed fully in the public domain. Phase III, of six months’ duration, must open proposed maps to systematic public scrutiny through district, provincial and parliamentary hearings, expert conferences, university consultations and digital platforms, ensuring that every substantial objection receives a written response. Phase IV would then produce a comprehensive National Provincial Reorganisation White Paper, followed by the necessary Constitutional Amendment Bill and accompanying Provincial Transition Acts. Phase V, finally, should implement change through a carefully sequenced transition authority: legal and institutional preparation in Year 1, administrative transfer in Year 2, fiscal and human-resource transition in Year 3, full provincial operation in Year 4, and an independent performance review in Year 5, treating the entire first half-decade as a monitored period of institutional maturation. Beyond these immediate steps, Pakistan must adopt a fifty-to-one-hundred-year horizon, designing provincial structures not for the next electoral cycle but for the demographic, climatic, hydrological, technological and economic realities of 2030, 2040, 2050, 2075 and the century ahead. To keep the federation adaptive rather than fossilised, every future provincial arrangement should incorporate a Periodic Provincial Review Mechanism—conducting, at fifteen-year intervals, systematic assessments of population, fiscal health, governance performance, boundaries, infrastructure and local-government efficacy—so that the administrative map remains a living instrument of national coherence rather than an inherited constraint. Within it, an objective Equalisation Formula—factoring population, poverty, geography, infrastructure gaps, fiscal capacity, tax effort, climate vulnerability and service-delivery costs—would ensure weaker provinces receive predictable support without moral hazard, while stronger ones are not permanently penalised for productivity. Government itself must shift from paperwork to performance, measuring every department by budget, targets, outputs, outcomes and audit rather than expenditure alone. Ultimately, a new province succeeds not by the proliferation of ministers, vehicles or residences, but by whether a child reaches a quality school, a patient a hospital, a citizen a land record, a business a licence, a farmer fair water, a victim justice, a young person employment, and an officer accountability. The national debate must therefore rise above the binary of “South Punjab or Hazara” or “four provinces or twelve” to the far more consequential question: what administrative architecture will furnish Pakistan’s citizens the best government for the next hundred years? India’s evidence-based States Reorganisation Commission, South Africa’s meticulous treatment of assets, liabilities and transitional institutions, and the United Kingdom’s sequenced white papers and legislation all affirm that territorial reform demands research, consultation, legislation and phased transition; Pakistan’s own Constitution—Articles 239, 160 and 140A—already supplies the legal scaffolding, while international norms of participation, equality and SDG 16 reinforce the imperative of effective, accountable institutions. Before any map is advanced, the nation is entitled to the underlying White Paper, the commission’s mandate and membership, the data, the boundary criteria, the fiscal projections and the transition roadmap. If these foundations remain incomplete, the only honest course is not to rush but to begin the work—because new provinces must be designed not for the next election, but for the next generation and the century beyond. Pakistan does not merely need new provinces; it needs a new provincial system grounded in constitutional consensus, independent research, public participation, economic viability, fiscal responsibility, strong local government, digital administration, transparent accountability and intergenerational foresight—the sole architecture capable of converting a political slogan into lasting national development.Pakistan already possesses the constitutional tools—Articles 239, 160, and 140A—and the international principles of participation, equality, and accountable institutions under SDG 16. What remains is the political will to use them properly. If the nation proceeds with evidence rather than expediency, with strong local governments rather than merely smaller provincial capitals, and with a fifty-to-one-hundred-year horizon rather than the next election cycle, then provincial reorganisation can become an instrument of genuine national development; it needs a provincial system designed for the citizens of 2100 and beyond.
