Over four budgets, the federal and provincial governments spent around Rs14 trillion for development. That’s the equivalent of $50 billion. That is what is at stake.
The arithmetic: Rs14 trillion divided by 307,374 sq miles of Pakistan’s land mass means development expenditure of nearly Rs5 crore per sq mile.Rs14 trillion could roughly fund 38,400 new schools, 23,600 new basic health units, 100,000 miles of farm-to-market roads and 10,600 water and sanitation schemes.
Question 1: Where did Rs14 trillion go? Question 2: Who monitored it? Question 3: What changed on the ground?Red alert: The real scandal is not the size of the number – the real scandal is the invisibility of the outcome.
Rs14 trillion was not spent in a vacuum. It was spent in districts. It was spent in cities. It was spent in villages. It was spent in constituencies. It was spent in the name of children, patients, farmers, workers and households. So where are the results?
Projects are approved in the Planning Commission or provincial P&D departments, funded by the federal and provincial finance departments, executed by line departments, monitored by paper-heavy review units — and blamed on contractors, cost escalation or delayed releases when citizens ask where the road, school or clinic went.
Cold facts: Everyone signs. No one owns. Everyone claims. No one answers. The reality: the current model has collapsed.Attention: Mohsin Naqvi’s call for new administrative units should be taken seriously — but carefully. If new provinces become new capitals, new motorcades, new secretariats and new patronage networks, Pakistan will only multiply failure. But if new administrative units are lean, digital, fiscally empowered and tied to public dashboards, they can become the architecture of delivery.
Warning: New administrative units are not a magic wand. A new map will not automatically build a school. A new province will not automatically staff a clinic. A new capital will not automatically clean water, pave roads or create jobs.
The issue is not geography alone. The issue is delivery architecture. If Pakistan redraws boundaries without changing incentives, monitoring and accountability, the country will not decentralise development. It will decentralise failure.
Every project must carry six pieces of public information: location, cost, contractor, timeline, physical progress and final outcome. The test is not allocation. The test is delivery.Rs14 trillion could have changed Pakistan’s map. Without delivery, it merely changed Pakistan’s books.
Mohsin Naqvi has started the right debate. But the debate must not become about maps alone. It must become about outcomes.Pakistan does not need more rulers. Pakistan needs smaller units that can deliver schools, clinics, roads, water, sanitation and jobs.
The writer is an Islamabad-based columnist.
