Pakistan is about to enter its 80th year with an administrative map that, in its essential form, still resembles the map it inherited in 1947.
We have changed almost everything around it – our population, economy, cities, districts, divisions, and the demands placed on government. Yet the basic structure of four provinces has remained unchanged.
The question, therefore, is not whether Pakistan needs more provinces for political convenience but whether four provinces can effectively govern a population of 241.5 million people.
The numbers should make us pause. At independence, Pakistan had roughly 30 million people. Today, the population stands at 241.5 million. Yet we continue to ask four provincial governments to administer this enormous population. Punjab alone has 127.7 million people, Sindh 55.7 million, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 40.9 million and Balochistan 14.9 million.
For perspective, Pakistan’s four provinces each administer an average of more than 60 million people. China, despite its population of around 1.4 billion, has 31 provincial-level administrative units, while India has 28 states and eight Union Territories.
Even more striking is how Pakistan’s administrative structure has expanded beneath the provincial level. Today, Punjab has 10 divisions and 41 districts; Sindh has seven divisions and 30 districts; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has seven divisions and 40 districts; and Balochistan, following a major administrative reorganisation in 2026, has 11 divisions and 41 districts. Yet despite this expansion of administrative units below the provincial level, the country has retained essentially the same four-province structure.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from the human cost. Pakistan has an estimated 25.1 million children aged 5–16 out of school. They represent 35 per cent of the country’s school-age population. Punjab accounts for 9.7 million out-of-school children, Sindh 7.4 million, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 4.5 million and Balochistan 3.5 million. The situation is particularly difficult in Balochistan, where nearly 69 per cent of children aged 5–16 are out of school. Education spending has fallen to around 0.8 per cent of GDP. And what happens to those who do attend school? After five years of education, only 51.4 per cent of Class 5 children can read a Class 2 story, while only 48.2 per cent can perform two-digit division. The reading figure has fallen from 59 per cent in 2019 to around 51 per cent in 2025.
The same story is visible in health and nutrition. Pakistan continues to face a serious child-nutrition crisis, with stunting and wasting remaining well above international thresholds. The National Nutrition Survey found that around two in five children under five were stunted, while 17.7 per cent were affected by acute malnutrition, or wasting. Food insecurity adds another layer to the crisis, with millions of Pakistanis facing inadequate access to nutritious food.
More than half the population – 55 per cent – does not have access to safe drinking water. Freshwater availability has fallen from 5,260 cubic metres per person in 1951 to below 1,000 today.
Justice tells another painful story. Almost 1.85 million cases are pending in district courts, averaging 549 cases per judge. Superior courts carry hundreds of thousands more cases.
These figures are not merely statistics. Behind every number is a child who cannot read, a mother travelling long distances for healthcare, a farmer waiting for irrigation support, a citizen waiting years for justice, or a family without safe drinking water.
Amid the growing national debate over whether Pakistan’s existing administrative structure is still fit for purpose, one idea deserves serious consideration: creating smaller, more manageable provinces on purely administrative grounds.
This idea is deliberately different from demands based on ethnicity or language. It envisages using Pakistan’s existing civil divisions rather than drawing new boundaries. One model in the broader debate envisages converting the country’s 32 traditional administrative divisions into provinces – 10 in Punjab, seven in Sindh, seven in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and eight in Balochistan – while Islamabad would remain the federal capital territory. Such an approach would create 33 administrative units without requiring the drawing of entirely new provincial boundaries.
The attraction is that much of the infrastructure already exists. Divisional headquarters already have government offices, officials and facilities. Existing field formations – schools, hospitals, colleges and district offices – would continue operating. The concept also envisages compact provincial administrations rather than simply reproducing today’s large bureaucracies.
India provides an interesting comparison. It began with 12 states and has progressively reorganised its federating units, reaching 28 states and eight Union Territories. Telangana was created in 2014, while Uttarakhand, formed in 2000, subsequently recorded substantially faster growth in per-capita income than its parent Uttar Pradesh.
The financial implications of any such restructuring would, of course, also require careful and independent examination.
None of this proves that simply creating provinces will automatically solve Pakistan’s problems. Provinces do not build schools, improve hospitals or eliminate poverty by themselves. Governance does. But governance becomes harder when decision-making is physically and administratively distant from the people it is supposed to serve.
The real debate, therefore, should not simply be ‘4 provinces vs 33 provinces’. It should be about whether Pakistan’s present administrative structure remains capable of delivering effective governance in the twenty-first century.
Pakistan has changed dramatically since 1947. Perhaps it is time for an equally serious conversation about whether its administrative map should change with it.
Ultimately, however, such a fundamental decision should be taken in consultation with the ultimate stakeholders in Pakistan’s future: the people of Pakistan. Any restructuring of the country’s administrative framework must therefore be guided above all by public consensus and the aspirations of the people it is intended to serve.
The writer is a leading Pakistani industrialist. He can be reached at: [email protected]
