Usama Qazzafi
IN July 2026, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi told the Pakistan Economic Summit in Islamabad that the governance system the country has operated under for decades has effectively collapsed. He warned that without structural change, Pakistan would still be debating the same problems a decade from now, and urged political parties to sit together and settle the question of new administrative units, whatever they end up being called, rather than leave it unresolved indefinitely. The statement, coming from a minister closely tied to the establishment, was read by many observers as more than a personal opinion; it amplified a long-standing establishment view that Pakistan’s four provinces have become too large to govern effectively.
The numbers back the diagnosis. Pakistan runs a federal government, four provinces, 169 districts and thousands of local bodies, yet the tier closest to citizens is consistently the weakest. Provincial capitals sit far from the people they serve: Rajanpur is 545 kilometres from Lahore, Tharparkar over 400 kilometres from Karachi, Gwadar roughly 900 kilometres from Quetta, and Chitral hundreds of kilometres from Peshawar. The 18th Amendment shifted authority from Islamabad to the provinces in 2010 but never completed the second step, pushing that authority down to districts and cities. The result, in practice, is four smaller centralised systems rather than one, each holding the money and the decision-making far from where services are actually delivered: schools, clinics, water, sanitation, and local roads.
The fiscal backdrop narrows the room for any reform. Pakistan’s domestic debt has grown from roughly Rs 2.1 trillion in FY2005 to Rs 54.5 trillion in FY2025, and interest payments now consume close to 70 percent of tax revenue. A government spending that much simply servicing debt has little capacity left to fund new provincial secretariats or bureaucracies, which is why local government experts increasingly argue the fix has to be administrative and fiscal, not just cartographic.
Political parties are not unified behind the idea, and their hesitation is not simply obstruction. Smaller parties with regional bases fear that redrawing boundaries dilutes their electoral weight, since provincial assemblies and Senate seats are tied to existing units. Nationalist parties in Sindh and Balochistan treat any restructuring proposal with suspicion, having spent decades resisting what they see as attempts by Islamabad or a province’s dominant faction to weaken their political standing. In Balochistan’s assembly, a 2026 divisional reorganisation triggered a walkout over the reassignment of areas tied to the old Kalat state, showing how quickly a boundary change can be read as a threat to identity rather than a governance fix. That reaction is understandable, but it also conflates two different arguments. A new district office, a divided division, or an elected mayor with a protected budget is a question of service delivery and administrative reach, not of ethnicity or historical grievance. Pakistan’s debate keeps losing that distinction, and every party has an incentive to blur it depending on where they stand.
The way through is not another commission or a redrawn map alone. It is smaller administrative units where the case for them is genuine, paired with local governments that hold guaranteed funding, fixed election cycles, and functions no provincial government can revoke at will. Naqvi is right that the system has collapsed; the fix he is pointing toward only works if it reaches the tehsil, not just a new provincial capital.
—The writer occasionally contributes.
