Pakistan has 240 million people and only four provinces to run them. Punjab alone has more than 110 million people in it, more than most countries on the planet, and it’s run as one single unit out of Lahore. If you live in Rajanpur or Dera Ghazi Khan, the government that’s supposed to serve you sits hundreds of kilometers away, focused on a city that barely knows your district exists. That’s not really an ethnic problem or a political one, even though it usually gets talked about that way. It’s a distance problem. And distance from government almost always means distance from development.
Look at how other countries have handled this.
Germany has 84 million people split across 16 states, called Länder, and each one actually runs its own affairs, schools, policing, a lot of its own budget, under a system where richer states help fund poorer ones so nobody gets left behind. Switzerland is even more extreme: 26 cantons for a population smaller than Karachi’s alone. Local government there handles almost everything, because the people making decisions are close enough to actually understand the problem.
The closest example to Pakistan, though, is India. In 1947 India kept the old colonial-era provinces mostly intact, just like we did. But in 1956, it broke them up and redrew the map along language lines, roughly doubling the number of states. It didn’t stop there, new states kept getting carved out for decades, most recently Telangana in 2014. And in case after case, the new, smaller states ended up more responsive to their own people, and several of them actually grew faster than the bigger states they were split from.
The logic isn’t complicated. Smaller units mean the person in charge is closer to the problem. A provincial government covering ten districts can actually know those ten districts. A provincial government covering forty can’t.
Here’s where a lot of these arguments get lazy: they act like drawing new lines on a map fixes everything by itself. It doesn’t. Nigeria is the cautionary tale. It went from 3 regions to 12 states in 1967, then kept splitting further, and now has 36 states, and its governance and corruption problems are still some of the worst in the world. Researchers who’ve studied this, like Daniel Treisman, have actually found that breaking big provinces into smaller ones can sometimes make corruption worse, not better, if there’s no real accountability built in at the new level. Poland and Russia both saw similar problems after redrawing internal borders faster than they built the institutions to run them.
So the honest version of this argument has a condition attached. Before Pakistan creates new provinces, it needs to settle who controls the tax money, how revenue gets split, who runs the police and courts in the new province, and how public jobs get filled, merit or patronage. Germany’s system works because the funding formula is locked into law, not left to politics every year. If Pakistan creates a new province and just drops the same old system, same corruption, same politically-controlled police, same patronage hiring, into a smaller box, nothing actually changes. It’s just Punjab’s problems on a smaller map.
Pakistan’s four provinces are basically a leftover of how the British drew the map for their own convenience, not for running a country of 240 million people. That map hasn’t moved while the population has quadrupled. South Punjab, the districts far from Quetta, Karachi, Hazara, they all say some version of the same thing: the government is too far away, and too focused on whoever’s sitting in the provincial capital.
The answer isn’t just announcing new provinces because it sounds good on a podium. It’s doing what India and Germany did, and what Nigeria didn’t, build the tax-sharing rules and the institutions first, then draw the lines. Do that, and a family in Turbat or Rajanpur finally gets a government that’s actually paying attention to them, instead of one that only shows up during election season.
Read more:https://digdebate.com/new-provinces-pakistan-devolution-government/
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