Every few years, Pakistan discovers a new ‘magic formula’ to fix its governance crisis. Today’s favourite slogan among a certain class is: make more provinces. And somehow the state will become responsive, corruption will vanish, services will improve and all historic grievances will melt away.
It sounds bold and simple, but its consequences would be disastrous. The moment you move from talk shows to the constitution, and from the map to the balance sheet, the proposal collapses. Worse, in the current context, the ‘new provinces’ campaign is being used as a political weapon – a way to pressure those defending the 7th NFC Award and the 18th Amendment to fall in line.
Pakistan is not suffering from too little government. It is suffering from too much of the wrong kind. We already have very large governments at both the federal and provincial levels, along with years of wasteful expenditure that have failed to produce meaningful outcomes for citizens. As a result, the federal government has to borrow heavily to sustain unproductive spending and service old debt, which is increasingly crowding out private-sector growth.
In this setting, multiplying provinces amounts to fiscal madness. A new province is an entire political and bureaucratic superstructure – complete with a governor, chief minister, cabinet and an expanded political class; a provincial assembly and its full apparatus; a separate high court and judicial infrastructure; as well as a civil secretariat, departments commissions, housing, vehicles, security, staff and pensions. Each new province would also require 20 Senate seats, leading to a disproportionate expansion of the upper house. All this when the distribution of existing resources is already deeply contentious. How will NFC be worked out between so many new entities?
The experience with the 7th NFC Award shows how difficult it is to sustain federal–provincial sharing arrangements under low growth and chronic deficits. Adding more provinces means locking in higher recurring expenditure for generations.
If the real goal is to bring the state closer to citizens, the rational path is very different: strong, empowered local governments; streamlined federal and provincial tiers; and a leaner, more focused state.
Constitutionally, this is not an ‘administrative reorganisation’. Pakistan is a federation of provinces. Under the constitution, changing a province’s boundaries or creating a new one requires a two-thirds majority in the concerned provincial assembly and a two-thirds majority in each House of Parliament to pass the constitutional amendment.
In today’s polarised politics, where even routine legislation is contentious, the idea that Pakistan can calmly negotiate and secure such super-majorities for a sweeping redrawing of the map is wishful thinking. In practice, securing that majority in at least three provincial assemblies – Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan – is close to impossible.
More importantly, the existing provinces are foundational to the very idea of Pakistan. The All-India Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution did not demand a vague abstraction called ‘Pakistan’. It called for: “…geographically contiguous units… in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India… in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority… grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign”.
Three core ideas are embedded in this language: geography plus demography – Muslim-majority provinces in contiguous zones; ‘independent states’ grouped together – an explicitly federal vision; and autonomous and sovereign constituent units – provinces as meaningful centres of power, not administrative outposts.
In short, Pakistan was justified and negotiated on the basis of Muslim-majority provinces, which constitute the building blocks of the federation.
Sindh’s constitutional history reinforces this. Sindh fought hard to be recognised as a separate province and was finally detached from the Bombay Presidency on April 1, 1936. Then, on March 3, 1943, the Sindh Legislative Assembly became the first legislature in British India to pass a resolution explicitly in favour of Pakistan. Moved by G M Syed, it endorsed a Muslim state along the lines of the Lahore Resolution and, crucially, spoke of complete autonomy for the provincial units joining Pakistan.
Pakistan, therefore, did not emerge from a unitary ‘national party’ claiming to speak for everyone. It emerged from Muslim-majority provinces, receiving formal approval from their assemblies on the basis of the promised autonomy in a federal arrangement.
Treating these provinces as endlessly divisible bargaining chips cuts directly against the historical bargain that made the state legitimate in the eyes of its federating units.
At this point, someone will say: ‘But India has redrawn its states many times. Why can’t we?’ Because the comparison ignores both constitutional design and foundational politics. India is a ‘union of states’ with a much stronger central hand. Parliament in New Delhi has wide powers to alter state boundaries, and state reorganisation has been a centrally managed instrument of political integration.
Pakistan is a federation of provinces, whose boundaries are constitutionally entrenched and can only be changed with a supermajority of the provincial assembly of the concerned province and both houses of parliament.
The Muslim League’s project was rooted in specific Muslim-majority provinces, and Pakistan’s credibility as a demand rested precisely on those provinces forming a viable, contiguous territorial bloc. To invoke India’s experience without this context is to pretend that Pakistan’s provinces are mere lines to be moved, rather than the original founding shareholders of the state.
Against this background, the current timing of the ‘new provinces’ campaign becomes revealing. The 7th NFC Award (2009) raised the provincial share in the divisible pool from 49 per cent to 56 per cent in 2010–11 and to 57.5 per cent thereafter, and adopted a multi-indicator formula rather than relying solely on population. As I have argued earlier, the 7th NFC did not ‘over-transfer’ resources to provinces; had the 5th NFC formula continued, the provinces would have received even higher shares. The 7th NFC merely corrected the distortions created by the 6th NFC, which was finalised by unrepresentative caretaker governments in 1997.
The 18th Amendment (2010), passed after months of work by an all-party parliamentary committee, involved over 100 constitutional changes, abolished the Concurrent Legislative List and significantly expanded provincial legislative and fiscal powers.
Together, they partially corrected decades of centralisation and restored something closer to the federal spirit implicit in 1940 and 1943.
Unsurprisingly, both have been under sustained attack from those who view provincial autonomy as an obstacle and fiscal devolution as a drain on Islamabad’s discretionary power.
The two recent constitutional amendments – the 26th and 27th – have intensified these concerns. They have been pushed through with thin majorities, limited debate and minimal consultation, significantly enhancing the power of the centre and curtailing the independence of the judiciary. In sharp contrast, the 1973 constitution and the 18th Amendment were crafted after months of deliberation and broad, cross-party consensus.
Critics rightly see a pattern: re-centralising power in Islamabad while weakening the provinces and institutional checks
It is in this climate that rhetoric about ‘new provinces’ has been turned up – most loudly where it hurts the principal political custodian of the 18th Amendment and 7th NFC: Sindh and its ruling party. The message is simple: ‘If you resist tinkering with the NFC or the 18th Amendment, we can always agitate to slice up your province’.
In other words, provincial territorial integrity is being placed on the bargaining table – not as a serious governance reform, but as leverage in a larger struggle over federal design and resource sharing.
If governance and service delivery were truly the objective, the reform agenda would look very different. Provincial governments would strengthen local governments through better legal frameworks and significantly higher resource transfers under fair and regularly awarded Provincial Finance Commissions. Federal and provincial governments would be rationalised and downsized, with strict controls on non-development spending and on overlapping jurisdictions. The 11th NFC Award would be negotiated honestly to incentivise both the centre and the provinces to grow the economic pie rather than merely fight over shares – within the framework of the 18th Amendment, not by undermining it.
None of this requires new provinces. All of it requires political will, institutional reform and a renewed commitment to the federal bargain that underwrote Pakistan’s birth.
The ‘myth of more provinces’ offers a cartographic shortcut to problems that actually demand hard work: building institutions, devolving power, enforcing rules and cutting the state down to a size the economy can sustain.
Pakistan does not need a new map. It needs the discipline and the courage to reform the state it already has.
The writer is a former managing partner of a leading professional services firm and has done extensive work on governance in the public and private sectors.
He tweets on X/Twitter: @Asad_Ashah
