Pakistan operates a federal government, four provincial governments, 169 districts, and thousands of local communities, yet the tier of government nearest to ordinary citizens is consistently the weakest. That, in essence, is the central contradiction running through Pakistani governance. National policy is made in Islamabad, and large budgets and bureaucracies sit in Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta, but citizens actually encounter “government” somewhere else entirely: in a school, a clinic, a police station, a municipal office, a road, a sewer line, or a water connection. The money collects at the top while the problems pile up at the bottom, which is precisely why the province, as a concept, needs to be reconsidered.
Look at how the structure actually works. The federal government collects most national revenue and transfers a large share to the provinces through the NFC Award. From there, provincial governments decide how much of that authority, money, and administrative capacity gets pushed further down to local bodies, and that final step rarely happens in any real sense. The 18th Amendment shifted power from Islamabad to the provinces, but it never finished the job of moving that power from the provinces to the citizen. In effect, Pakistan traded one centralized system for four smaller centralized systems, with Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta each becoming the seat of power for their respective province. But Rajanpur sits 545 kilometres from Lahore, Tharparkar is more than 400 kilometres from Karachi, Gwadar is roughly 900 kilometres from Quetta, and Chitral is hundreds of kilometres from Peshawar — meaning provincial rule can feel just as distant to ordinary citizens as federal rule once did.
Pakistan’s economic geography adds another layer to the problem. The economy doesn’t function along provincial boundaries, it runs through cities, industrial clusters, ports, highways, labour markets, and supply chains. Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, and the Rawalpindi–Islamabad corridor each operate as distinct economic zones, whether centered on manufacturing, exports, services, or industry. But the political map is drawn around provinces, the administrative map around secretariats, and the citizen’s map around their own neighbourhood, a fundamental mismatch. Cities that generate much of the country’s economic output have limited control over the policies shaping their own productivity; districts are held responsible for outcomes without the independent fiscal power to act; and provincial departments nominally oversee schools, hospitals, and roads they can neither properly supervise nor ever actually visit. Because so many decisions have to travel up the chain before they can travel back down, responsibility becomes hopelessly blurred. When a school fails to function or water doesn’t arrive, it’s unclear whether the teacher, the district administration, the provincial department, the minister, the municipality, a development authority, or a cantonment board is actually accountable, Pakistan has built a system where everyone holds some authority and no one holds complete responsibility, which is the opposite of real accountability.
The guiding principle should be straightforward: if a service is local in nature, the authority over it should be local too. Schools, clinics, water, sanitation, solid waste, building permissions, land use, and local roads are all inherently local matters, there’s no real reason they should require large provincial bureaucracies located hundreds of kilometres away. What Pakistan needs instead is a new governing arrangement: a single strong federation responsible for genuinely national matters, defence, foreign affairs, currency, macroeconomic management, national tax policy, interstate infrastructure, and national standards, paired with strong, constitutionally protected city and district governments beneath it. These would not be symbolic local bodies waiting on provincial approval, nor administrations dependent on discretionary grants, but real governments with clearly defined functions, defined taxing powers, defined transfers, professional administration, elected leadership, and measurable outcomes. Every city and district should know exactly how much funding it will receive, and every citizen should know exactly what that funding is meant to deliver, how many children were enrolled in school, how many patients received primary healthcare, how many kilometres of road were maintained, how much clean water was supplied, how much sewage was treated, how much waste was collected. Money should be tied to outcomes, authority tied to responsibility, and responsibility tied to accountability.
There’s also a competitive case for this shift. Picture Karachi competing with Lahore for investment, Faisalabad competing with Gujranwala for manufacturing, Sialkot competing globally on exports, Peshawar positioning itself as a regional trade hub, and Quetta building around minerals, logistics, and connectivity. Empowered cities would have real incentive to improve infrastructure, simplify permissions, digitize land records, cut transaction costs, and attract capital. Rather than pursuing a single national growth strategy, Pakistan could have as many as twenty city-level growth engines and potentially 169 district-level delivery engines. None of this is about weakening the Pakistani state, it’s about closing the distance between the citizen and the government meant to serve them. The real question is no longer whether Pakistan needs more provinces, but whether it needs provinces at all: one federation, powerful cities, powerful districts, clear functions, clear money, and clear accountability. Pakistan’s problem was never a shortage of government, it’s the absence of government exactly where its citizens actually live.
