The year is 1858. Undivided India is a patchwork of kingdoms, principalities and districts, and on paper power appears remarkably dispersed. Enter the Indian prince. He has a palace, a court and subjects who address him as sovereign. He may collect taxes, dispense justice and administer his territory; his seal appears on orders and his officials carry them out.
Yet foreign policy and defence lie beyond his reach, and a British Resident or Political Agent watches over his relationship with the paramount power. His authority is considerable, but it ends precisely where the most consequential questions of sovereignty begin.
Sovereignty remains indivisible even where administration appears local. The prince’s seal gives imperial arrangements a familiar face, while the Resident ensures that the limits of his authority remain understood. Running parallel is directly administered British India, where the imperial hierarchy is far more visible.
The Collector-Magistrate in the regulation provinces, and the Deputy Commissioner in Punjab and other non-regulation territories, stand at the centre of district government, collecting revenue and exercising considerable executive authority. Above them sit commissioners and provincial governments; above them sits the Raj.
British paramountcy is filtered through local rulers in one part of India and exercised through an imperial bureaucracy in another, but decisive authority ultimately rests with the Crown.
This was “divide and rule” in a form more sophisticated than the phrase usually suggests. The British created a political ecosystem in which rulers, provinces and constituencies remained sufficiently divided to prevent any one of them from accumulating enough power to challenge imperial authority.
Local rulers and institutions were given room to function, while the political order itself remained firmly under British control.
Pakistan inherited much of this administrative machinery almost intact. The imperial sovereign disappeared, but the bureaucracy, district hierarchy and habit of governing vertically from the centre proved far more durable.
British paramountcy gave way to a Pakistani central state, while the old question remained familiar: how much authority could be allowed to provinces, districts and local politicians without creating an independent centre of political power?
By the late 1950s, that inherited centre had acquired a distinctly military-bureaucratic character. Ayub Khan adapted it to Pakistan’s first military regime through the Basic Democracies system of 1959.
Elections were introduced at the union-council level while political authority remained concentrated in the presidency. The 80,000 Basic Democrats represented their local communities, but they also became the electoral college through which the president and the legislatures derived their legitimacy. The arrangement allowed the centre to cultivate a political base at the grassroots while weakening the parties and representative institutions that connected those communities to provincial and national politics.
The Bhutto years restored parliamentary government under the Constitution of 1973, though a durable local tier never followed. Zia-ul-Haq returned to non-party local elections while organised national politics remained constrained.
Musharraf later empowered district nazims and transferred substantial responsibilities downward while weakening the provincial political tier under a military-led centre. The institutional forms changed, but the tension between local participation and concentrated national authority survived.
Which brings us to July of this year. On July 30, the interior minister told the Pakistan Economic Summit that the country’s governance system had collapsed and called for a structural overhaul that could include new provinces or administrative units.
The following day, the military’s spokesperson described good governance as a matter of national security, said any administrative reorganisation it required deserved serious consideration, and stressed that the decision ultimately belonged to the political process. Senior political figures soon distanced themselves from the idea.
One governing party ruled out any division of Sindh, while leaders of the other were asked to wait for a settled policy before commenting publicly. On August 15, Dawn reported that three possibilities remained under consideration in Islamabad: the creation of new provinces, the formation of other administrative units, or a revived and empowered local-government system.
Meanwhile, proposals ranging from roughly a dozen units to twenty or more have circulated in public discussion.
There is an obvious administrative case for reconsidering the present arrangement. Punjab has a population larger than most countries, while the sheer geography of Balochistan makes administration from Quetta difficult. A smaller unit can shorten the distance between an official and the citizen who needs him. Yet the number of capitals on a map tells us surprisingly little about how decentralised a country actually is.
More than fifteen years after the 18th Amendment transferred substantial responsibilities to the provinces, provincial taxation still amounts to around one per cent of GDP.
Collections have improved, yet the large majority of provincial revenues continue to depend on federally collected taxes and transfers. Pakistan has become considerably better at devolving responsibility for spending than at building independent revenue bases beneath the federation.
That weakness becomes harder to ignore when the discussion moves from four provinces to twenty. Any new unit worth the name would require its own executive and administrative machinery, while a full-fledged province would also bring with it a legislature and the institutions that accompany provincial government.
Many proposed units would begin with narrower tax bases than Punjab or Sindh while carrying the recurrent costs of governing themselves. If four provincial governments have struggled to raise meaningful revenues of their own, multiplying the number of units before defining their fiscal powers could spread the same weakness across a much larger administrative structure.
How would the NFC work in a federation of twelve or twenty provinces? Pakistan has struggled for more than fifteen years to replace the Seventh NFC Award even with only four provinces at the table. A larger federation would have to reopen the horizontal distribution of the divisible pool, recalculating population, poverty, revenue generation and the other criteria through which provincial shares are determined.
Any creation of new provinces would also reopen the question of representation in the Senate, where the existing provinces enjoy equal weight. Administrative cartography is the easy part; the harder part is the fiscal and constitutional balance of the federation.
The difficulty begins before the first new secretariat opens. Would Islamabad continue collecting most of the taxes and then distribute the same pool among a larger number of provincial governments? What share would each receive?
How would poorer units finance the machinery that comes with provincial status? And if the new governments remain overwhelmingly dependent on transfers from the centre, how much political autonomy has actually been created?
The experience since the 18th Amendment already points to the problem. Responsibilities moved downward much faster than revenue mobilisation. Provinces acquired greater spending obligations while their own tax effort remained weak, and the federal government continued operating in several areas that had formally been devolved.
The result has left both sides dissatisfied: provinces remain dependent on federal transfers, while Islamabad increasingly complains that too little of the national revenue pool remains available for obligations at the centre.
There is plenty of discussion about how many provinces Pakistan needs, but remarkably little about how they would pay their bills. Smaller units may bring government closer to the citizen; they also require revenues, bureaucracies and a workable claim on the federal purse.
Switzerland offers one answer. Its communes participate directly in taxation, with municipal tax multipliers tying part of what residents pay to the government they elect locally. New York City follows an entirely different route but reaches a similar relationship through property, personal income and business taxes raised by the city itself.
Pakistan can copy neither model wholesale. Their relevance lies in the fiscal connection between a local government and the citizen who pays for it.
That connection remains weak in Pakistan. Which taxes would the new units own outright? Which revenues would remain within the NFC? Would property taxation finally become genuinely local? Would cities and districts receive durable revenue sources of their own? Would elected local governments be able to spend on local priorities without waiting for a provincial capital to release development funds?
The Constitution already points toward this question. Article 140A requires every province to establish elected local governments and devolve political, administrative and financial authority to them, yet that third tier remains incomplete.
One of the parties campaigning for new provinces has simultaneously threatened court action to enforce Article 140A, while Punjab has allocated Rs12.52 billion for local elections after an eleven-year gap. Taken together, these developments show that Pakistan is debating an entirely new provincial architecture while the devolution already written into its Constitution remains unfinished.
Local government itself offers no automatic escape from the historical problem. Ayub, Zia and Musharraf demonstrated that an active local tier can coexist quite comfortably with a highly centralised national order. Each found his own institutional route to the grassroots: Basic Democrats under Ayub, non-party councils under Zia and district nazims under Musharraf.
The names changed, as did the administrative powers involved, while parties and representative institutions occupying the space between the centre and the locality repeatedly found themselves under pressure.
Seen against that history, the proposal for numerous smaller provinces invites a larger question.
A federation may acquire more executives, legislatures and administrative centres while each individual unit becomes smaller and more fiscally dependent than the province it replaced. If fragmentation weakens the territorial bases from which political parties and provincial governments draw their bargaining strength, and the new units continue looking upward for most of their revenues, administrative decentralisation could coexist once again with a remarkably durable centre.
There are serious cases for southern Punjab, Hazara and other new units, and geography, population and longstanding political demands deserve consideration on their merits.
Every new province, however, would become a new claimant on the federation, require its own administrative structure and enter a new relationship with the NFC. Its autonomy would depend on the revenue it can raise, the priorities it can set and the authority that ultimately reaches the districts beneath it.
Until those questions are answered, the proposal invites comparison with an older constitutional pattern in which the multiplication of administrative units did little to diminish the authority of the centre and, at times, made that authority easier to exercise.
The subcontinent has long displayed a remarkable ability to multiply offices without multiplying sovereignty. The Raj governed through princes in one place and district officers in another, while ultimate authority remained readily identifiable.
Pakistan’s later experiments in devolution repeatedly encountered the same tension between the dispersal of administration and the concentration of power.
The current debate may yet produce a genuine departure from that history, but that will depend on how much political and fiscal authority actually crosses the new boundaries. A federation may acquire many capitals and still leave the centre exactly where it was.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is an economist and an educationist
Comments