Islamabad, Oct 5 (IANS) Sindh province has again become a point of contention as the debate over Pakistan’s territorial restructuring reignites with renewed intensity. The costs of such restructuring are not trivial, as each new province requires a governor, cabinet, secretariat, police command, administrative machinery and resources that could otherwise be used for the development of schools, hospitals or infrastructure and creates fresh avenues for patronage, diverting limited resources into political bargaining instead of public service, a report has cautioned.
Every few years, proposals emerge for dividing the provinces of Punjab or Sindh, portrayed as solutions to unwieldy governance. However, increasing the number of provinces will not automatically translate into proximity between residents and decision-makers. If Pakistan creates 10 or 12 new provinces, the likely result would be more secretariats, governors, assemblies, adding another layer of bureaucracy stamping files. The seat of power would shift geographically; however, the culture of centralised control will remain same in Pakistan, a report in Asian News Post mentioned.
“The costs of such restructuring are not trivial. Each new province demands a governor, cabinet, secretariat, police command, and administrative machinery, resources that could otherwise fund schools, hospitals, or infrastructure. Worse, it creates fresh avenues for patronage, diverting scarce resources into political bargaining rather than public service,” the report stated.
“The electoral system compounds the dysfunction. Metropolitan economies require leadership accountable to entire cities, yet Pakistan’s patchwork of wards incentivizes representatives to maximize benefits for their own neighborhoods. The result is incoherence in transit planning, housing, and economic strategy, a fragmentation that mirrors the failures of provincial governance itself,” it added.
At its core, the debate about provinces is not only about governance but about resources, who controls them and who benefits. Since 2023, Pakistan has been involved in a gruelling economic stabilisation programme that has strangled growth and burdened people in the name of rebuilding fiscal and foreign exchange buffers. Those buffers remain depleted, and conducting restructuring of provinces against popular wishes risks increasing identity-driven politics across a multiethnic landscape.
This would also cause discontent among youth in Pakistan who are already facing unemployment, poverty and systemic failure. According to the statistics, half of the population in Pakistan lives below the poverty line, 28 million children remain out of school, four in 10 experience stunted growth, three-fourths have contaminated water, and investors, domestic and foreign, are deterred by insecurity. Amid all these problems, creating new provinces in Pakistan seems misguided and dangerous, according to a report in Asian News Post.
In July, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said that the country’s current governance system has collapsed and was unable to resolve the issues faced by the country.
In his address at the Pakistan Economic Summit, Naqvi called for talks among political parties to introduce reforms in the current governance system and proposed the creation of new provinces and bringing administrative reforms.
“The system we are living under has collapsed. Problems cannot be solved through it,” leading Pakistani daily Dawn quoted Naqvi as saying.
He said that Pakistan will continue to discuss the same issues even after 10 years if this system continues and stressed that a reset was important. Naqvi said that the “failed system” had continued in Pakistan for 70 years. He mentioned that Pakistan has been importing wheat despite being an agricultural nation, Dawn reported.
–IANS
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