Devolve Power, Not Provinces

Pakistan has tried this before. It failed the first time for a familiar reason, and it will fail again unless the next attempt gets serious about power, not paperwork.
In 2024, the Punjab government quietly dismantled the South Punjab Secretariat. It removed the additional chief secretaries who ran it. No new law was passed. No debate was held in the Assembly. A structure created in 2020 to answer decades of regional grievance vanished with a set of transfer orders. Within weeks, PPP lawmakers were back on the floor of the National Assembly, reviving the old demand for separate Bahawalpur and South Punjab provinces. The cycle had turned again, exactly as it has turned every decade since Partition.
This is the real subject at stake, and it is worth stating plainly: devolve power, not provinces. Pakistan does not need a new line on the map. It needs a working answer to the question of who controls a region’s money and its appointments — an answer sturdy enough to survive a change of government. Two extremes dominate the debate. One camp wants full new provinces. The other refuses to let go of a single administrative inch. Both miss a third option that other federations settled long ago: keep the province intact, keep its constitutional shape untouched, and move the actual centre of decision-making closer to the people who live under it.
Start with what already exists. Divisions, districts and tehsils are colonial inventions. Their job was never representation. It was revenue collection and control, run from a distance, for the benefit of a government that did not live there. Independence changed the flag over these offices. It did not change their logic. Files still travel to a provincial capital before anything gets built, staffed or funded. When a region concludes that the capital’s elite has cornered its jobs, its colleges and its development budget, the complaint stops being bureaucratic. It becomes an identity wound. That is the grievance driving South Punjab, Hazara, Bahawalpur and, in a different register, Karachi.
The numbers back this up. When Prime Minister Imran Khan inaugurated the South Punjab Secretariat in 2021, he cited government figures showing the region held 33 percent of Punjab’s population but had historically received only 17 percent of its development budget — a gap his government put at roughly Rs260 billion in lost allocations under earlier administrations. Whatever one makes of the politics behind that announcement, the underlying arithmetic of neglect is not seriously disputed by any major party. It shows up again every time a new government’s critics accuse it of starving the south to fund schemes near the chief minister’s own constituency.
Building a full province to fix that arithmetic is, in practical terms, close to impossible. Article 239 of the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament and the consent of the existing provincial assembly. Behind that single hurdle sits a second, thornier set of negotiations: rewriting the NFC Award, dividing river water rights, reallocating job quotas, and redrawing seats in the National Assembly and Senate. No governing party, however sympathetic its rhetoric, has an incentive to open that negotiation, because it means renegotiating the very arithmetic that put it in power. This is precisely why other federations facing the same grievance chose a narrower fix: give the region control over money and appointments, without touching the map.
India offers the clearest comparison. Vidarbha and Marathwada carried the same complaint against Mumbai that South Punjab carries against Lahore — investment, jobs and attention pooling in one city while the rest of the state waited. Article 371(2) of the Indian Constitution allowed the President to establish statutory development boards for these regions, with fixed formulas for fund allocation overseen by the Governor. Maharashtra never split. It kept one chief minister, one legislature, one flag. That is the model worth studying.
It is also worth being honest about where that model has struggled. The Vidarbha and Marathwada boards lost their statutory extension in April 2020, and successive Maharashtra governments left them without members or funding for years afterward, drawing repeated complaints from legislators across party lines that a constitutional mechanism was being allowed to lapse by simple bureaucratic neglect. The lesson is not that decentralisation fails. It is that a board without an automatic, legally enforced trigger for renewal is exactly as vulnerable as an administrative order — it survives only as long as someone in power finds it convenient. Pakistan’s South Punjab Secretariat, created by executive notification rather than constitutional amendment, was even more exposed than the Indian boards, and it went the way its design invited.
Britain supplies a cleaner success story, for a specific reason: direct election. Greater Manchester and the West Midlands elect their own mayors, who hold real control over transport, housing and skills budgets, without altering the unity of England’s Parliament in the slightest. The office survives changes of national government because it answers to local voters, not to a minister’s goodwill. China’s autonomous prefectures deserve a more careful mention. They grant limited scope for local language and culture inside a rigid, centrally controlled system, but the same framework has coexisted with well-documented cultural suppression in Xinjiang and Tibet. It is not a model to import in full, and no serious comparison should present it as one. France’s métropoles and Indonesia’s special autonomy arrangements for Aceh and Papua — the latter including a fixed share of resource revenue and local law-making power — sit closer to the workable end of the spectrum, precisely because they pair local control with legal permanence.
The pattern across the successful cases is specific, and it is not complicated. Decentralisation that lasts has three features: a constitutional or statutory basis that a single government cannot undo by notification, an automatic and formula-based share of the budget rather than a discretionary allocation, and a channel for locally elected voices inside the new body rather than officials appointed from the centre. South Punjab’s secretariat had none of the three, which is exactly why removing it took a memo rather than a law.
None of this requires redrawing Pakistan’s map or reopening the seat-allocation fights that make new provinces politically radioactive. It requires the Council of Common Interests, or a future constitutional amendment package, to write South Punjab’s development board into the Constitution rather than into a chief minister’s discretion — with a fixed percentage of the provincial budget transferred automatically, a head appointed through a transparent process insulated from a change of government, and a formal seat at the table for elected members from Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan. That is a narrower ask than a new province, and a far more durable one than a secretariat that can be dissolved on a Tuesday afternoon.
The deeper argument in Pakistan against any of this is not really about administration. It is about memory. The One Unit scheme of 1955 forced every province of West Pakistan into a single unit, largely to offset East Pakistan’s Bengali majority, and it left regional politics permanently suspicious of any restructuring proposed from the centre. That suspicion is not irrational. It is why provincial governments resist even modest devolution, fearing it as the first quiet step toward losing seats and revenue. It is also why communities demanding change dismiss modest gestures as theatre designed to defuse pressure rather than answer it. Both sides are reading from the same history, and both have reason to.
Breaking that stalemate does not require choosing a side in the old argument between centralisation and secession. It requires building something neither side has fully tried: a body with a name in the Constitution, money that arrives on a formula rather than a favour, and a chair reserved for people the region actually elected. Until Pakistan builds that, it will keep having this argument every time a government changes hands, because the underlying grievance was never actually addressed — only relocated to a new building with a Multan address, waiting for the next notification to close it down.