The simplest way to understand the new provinces debate is to ask what an administrative unit is for, and the answer, in Pakistan as anywhere, is that it exists to bring decisions, budgets and services closer to the people they serve, which is a question of management and not a question of who anyone is. Yet in Sindh the proposal has been heard as an attack on identity, with the provincial assembly’s resolution invoking the province’s centuries-old heritage and its legislature’s 1943 resolution in support of Pakistan, and the sentiment is sincere, but it mistakes a tier of government for a statement of belonging.
Consider what the existing structure asks of a single provincial government. The 2023 census recorded 127.68 million people in Punjab, 55.69 million in Sindh, 40.85 million in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 14.89 million in Balochistan, and each of these governments must set budgets, command police and staff hospitals from one provincial capital, which is a heavy burden when the country had about 33.8 million people in 1951 and has kept the same four provinces since 1947. The state did adapt in other ways, since the MQM-P chairman has noted that new districts and divisions were created as the population grew, and nobody suggests that a new district changed anyone’s heritage, so the principle that administrative tiers should follow population is already accepted and the debate is only about the top tier.
That is why the identity argument does not hold. MQM-P legislators told the Sindh Assembly that creating new districts had not divided Karachi and that Sindh could have cities, districts and divisions, and a Sindhi in Larkana does not become less Sindhi because another district exists in Karachi, just as a language, a literature, a music and a history do not live in a government department. The same legislators say they consider themselves part of Sindh and seek administrative arrangements, not its breakup, while the PPP itself has said it favours new provinces while cautioning against dividing Sindh, which shows that the principle of administrative units is not what is contested. India’s experience points the same way, since Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand were carved out of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in 2000 and the people of those regions kept their languages and cultures, which are protected by the constitution and not by boundaries.
The case must still be made on results, because governance gains are not automatic. A study of India’s 2000 reorganisation found no statistical evidence that the combined states grew faster than their counterfactuals, though Uttarakhand did, and another analysis found that the effects varied, with Jharkhand faring worse than Bihar. The lesson is that units should be judged like any administrative reform, by whether they improve service delivery, accountability and fiscal capacity, and one Pakistani editorial has rightly warned that such changes should not burden the exchequer with new ministries and layers of bureaucracy.
How much consensus is needed follows from this. Article 239 requires that any amendment altering a province’s limits pass that province’s assembly with at least two-thirds of its total membership, and a former additional attorney general adds that two-thirds of both houses of Parliament are required too, so no change can happen without Sindh’s own assembly, and no single party commands such a majority anyway. That legal minimum is the floor, and the broader consensus should be built around objective criteria such as population, area and revenue base, written guarantees for language and culture in every new unit, and a representative commission, since the PTI chairman and the Defence Minister have both stressed that any decision must rest on consensus.
Nor need the reform be expensive, which is the objection most often raised against it. Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has said that no significant new financial arrangements would be required, apart from an assembly for Islamabad, because the proposal largely involves restructuring existing institutions, and the larger expense, on his account, lies in the status quo, since all social indicators have deteriorated despite the additional resources transferred under the National Finance Commission. A unit sized to its population can spend money that already flows to a distant capital closer to the clinic and the classroom, and if new units are built as lean secretariats rather than copies of full provincial structures, they could deliver more governance for less. But the argument for administrative units never needed to touch who anyone is, and once supporters and sceptics alike separate the map of administration from the map of belonging, the real question, whether people will be governed better and at what price, can be answered with evidence.
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