_akhbar.jpg)
Pakistan’s rulers have discovered a new remedy for failed governance: redraw the country.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi has declared that the present system has collapsed and called for new provinces or ‘administrative units’. Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has now proposed dividing all four provinces into three, producing perhaps 12-15 provinces. An unofficial map showing Sindh split into three has intensified public suspicion, although no formal plan has been announced. The Sindh Assembly has rejected any division of the province.
Most debate has centred on ethnicity, representation, resources and constitutional procedure. Almost nobody has asked the ground beneath our feet what it will cost.
A new province is not merely a line on a map. It usually demands a capital, assembly, governor’s house, chief minister’s secretariat, high court, departmental offices, official residences, police headquarters, roads, parking areas and security zones. Around these rises another city: housing societies, commercial districts, private schools, hospitals and speculative land schemes. Administrative reform is translated into concrete, steel, asphalt and groundwater.
There is also an uncomfortable possibility: administrative reform could become the sugar-coated pill through which another property boom is sold to the public. Where political office, real-estate interests and establishment patronage overlap, the promise of better governance deserves close scrutiny.
Announcing new capitals can transform land values long before an assembly meets or a citizen receives better services. Who owns land around the proposed sites? Do ministers, their business associates or companies linked to them stand to benefit? Those interests should be disclosed before any decision is taken. Otherwise, the public may inherit the ecological damage while a well-connected business coterie collects the appreciation.
Consider a conservative scenario. If Pakistan moved from four provinces to 12, it could require eight additional capitals. Suppose each eventually occupied only 10,000 acres, including its institutional core and surrounding urban expansion. That would place 80,000 acres – approximately 324 square kilometres – under new development. The figure excludes the speculative sprawl that would almost certainly spread beyond the official boundaries.
Now consider construction. If each capital required one million square metres of assembly, judicial, administrative, residential and associated public buildings, eight capitals would create eight million square metres of new floor space. Using a moderate embodied-carbon estimate of 500 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per square metre, their buildings alone would release about four million tonnes of emissions before they were fully occupied. Roads, bridges, drains, power networks, cement plants and the later private construction boom would push the total considerably higher.
This is not an abstract concern. The UN Environment Programme says buildings and construction already account for around 37 per cent of global carbon emissions and nearly half of material extraction. Every tonne of cement requires limestone, fuel and transport. Every road consumes stone and bitumen. Every brick carries soil and smoke from somewhere else. Pakistan would be creating several construction fronts in a country whose cities already struggle with poisoned air.
Water presents an equally serious bill. Assume a modest eventual population of 250,000 people around each new capital and daily demand of 120 litres per person. Eight capitals would require almost 88 billion litres of water annually – around 71,000 acre-feet – before industrial and landscaping needs were counted. Pakistan is already water-stressed, and many cities depend heavily on declining or contaminated aquifers. A capital planted in a dry district does not manufacture water by administrative notification.
Then comes hydrology. Open land absorbs rain. Concrete redirects it. Eight new urban footprints would replace soil, vegetation and farmland with roofs, roads and parking areas, increasing runoff and flood risk. Pakistan has repeatedly watched badly planned expansion turn rainfall into disaster. Yet we continue to approve development first and search for drains after the water arrives.
Sindh has particular reason to be alarmed. Karachi is already burdened by concrete, heat, traffic, disappearing open space and overstretched water and sewerage systems. Creating additional provincial capitals elsewhere could consume agricultural land and intensify extraction from the Indus system. Keeping Karachi as the capital of one proposed unit would not spare it either; it could trigger new layers of secretariats, security infrastructure and contested jurisdiction inside an already suffocating metropolis.
None of this means Pakistan’s administrative structure is beyond reform. Government is remote, overcentralised and often indifferent to districts. But why must devolution begin with new capitals? Existing divisional headquarters already possess offices, courts, roads and public institutions. They could host smaller administrations through adaptive reuse, shared facilities and digital government. Elected, financially empowered local governments would bring authority closer to citizens without manufacturing assemblies and governors.
Before one constitutional line is altered, every proposal should undergo a strategic environmental assessment. It should disclose the proposed capitals, land ownership within their growth corridors, projected water demand, farmland loss, construction emissions and flood consequences. Otherwise, ‘administrative units’ may become an innocent phrase concealing an immense land-and-concrete project.
Pakistan’s environmental apathy is most visible in what its politics refuses to count. We calculate ministries, seats and majorities, but not aquifers, emissions, heat or displaced soil. If new provinces are truly intended to improve governance, their environmental cost must be known before their borders are drawn. A state cannot cure administrative failure by constructing new ecological failures.
The writer is an expert on climate change and sustainable development and the founder of the Clifton Urban Forest. He tweets/posts @masoodlohar and can be reached at: [email protected]
