Look at a map of Pakistan and you are, in a strange way, looking at a document written by the British Raj. Punjab was stitched together after the East India Company beat the Sikh armies in 1849. Sindh was carved out even earlier and, for a while, was simply run out of Bombay. The North-West Frontier was cut away from Punjab in 1901 because a viceroy named Curzon wanted an easier way to police the Pashtun districts near Afghanistan. Balochistan was never really one place at all, part of it was ruled directly, part of it through tribal agents on the payroll of the Crown. None of these lines were drawn by the people who lived inside them. They were drawn to help London tax, garrison, and control a subcontinent.
Pakistan came into being in 1947 and simply kept this map. Almost eighty years later, it is still using it.
That alone would not be much of a scandal. Plenty of borders around the world began as colonial conveniences. What makes Pakistan’s case worth talking about is what it did next: nothing. Compare it to two other federations born out of the same imperial century. The United States started with thirteen states and kept adding more as its population moved west, eventually reaching fifty. India inherited a map just as arbitrary as Pakistan’s, princely states, presidencies, agencies, and then, in 1956, tore much of it up. The States Reorganisation Act redrew Indian state lines along linguistic grounds, and Delhi has kept doing this ever since, most recently splitting off Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, and Jharkhand in 2000, then carving Telangana out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. Both countries treated their internal map as something you revisit as the country grows. Pakistan has treated its map as something closer to scripture.
The numbers explain why this has become uncomfortable. Punjab’s population crossed 127 million in the 2023 census, more people than live in Japan, and over half of everyone in Pakistan. A province that size cannot be governed the way a province of ten or twenty million can be. A farmer in Rajanpur or a shopkeeper in Bahawalpur is, in practical terms, an afterthought to a government machine headquartered in Lahore, hundreds of kilometres and several layers of bureaucracy away. Balochistan sits at the other extreme: nearly half the country’s land area, but so thinly populated and so poorly connected that a chief minister in Quetta struggles to reach, let alone govern, the province’s own periphery. Sindh’s rural interior and its megacity, Karachi, home to over 20 million people from every ethnic community in the country, barely resemble each other, yet both answer to the same provincial assembly.
None of this is a new complaint. Demands for a South Punjab province, sometimes called Janoobi Punjab, go back decades and cleared the National Assembly as a resolution back in 2012. A bill to actually create it, along with a separate Bahawalpur province, was tabled in 2019. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly has already endorsed carving out a Hazara province for the province’s Hindko-speaking north. Even now, in September 2026, parliament has scheduled a fresh debate on the subject, with more than one senior politician arguing that growing populations and administrative overload leave no real choice. These are not fringe ideas. They keep resurfacing because the underlying problem keeps growing, census after census.
So why has nothing moved? Partly because in Pakistan, unlike India or the United States, “redrawing the map” has never meant a technical, one-off adjustment. It carries the memory of the One Unit scheme of 1955, when West Pakistan’s provinces were merged into a single unit for reasons that had little to do with good governance and everything to do with balancing East Pakistan’s population, an experiment abandoned by 1970 precisely because it ignored provincial identity. That history left a lingering suspicion that any talk of new provinces is really a play for political advantage, not a genuine fix for administration. Sindh’s response to the current debate captures the fear well: its assembly passed a resolution this month rejecting outright any division of the province, describing it as a historic and constitutional entity that should not be touched. For many in Sindh and Balochistan, smaller provinces sound less like decentralisation and more like a slow dilution of their political weight, especially in a country where Punjab already dominates parliament by sheer numbers. Much of this fear comes from a confusion that is worth clearing up. Many people treat the creation of a new administrative unit as an attack on identity, as if drawing an internal boundary somehow erases who a Sindhi or a Baloch or a Saraiki is. But that is not what is being proposed. An administrative unit is a tool for governance, a way of deciding who collects the revenue and who answers to whom. It is not the same thing as a nation, a language, or a people. Splitting Sindh’s administration into smaller units, if that were ever done carefully and with consent, would no more erase Sindhi identity than splitting Punjab into smaller provinces erases Punjabi identity. The two questions who governs a district, and who a person is, do not have to be tied together the way the debate usually assumes.
That resistance deserves to be taken seriously, not waved away. But it is also worth asking what the alternative actually is. A country can decide that its administrative map should be adjusted every generation or two, the way India and the United States have done, openly and through debate. Or it can decide that the map is fixed forever, no matter what the population does. Pakistan has quietly chosen the second option for over seventy years, without ever really deciding it out loud. A serious conversation about new provinces does not have to mean redrawing everything at once, and it does not have to threaten anyone’s political survival. But refusing to have the conversation at all, while the population keeps outgrowing the boundaries the British left behind, is its own kind of decision, and not obviously the safer one.
Read more: https://digdebate.com/constitutional-mechanics-new-provinces-local-governance-pak/
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