Redrawing Pakistan?—III A federal compact from below

The answer to centralised provinces is not centralised cartography, but a constitutional order in which powers, money and accountability meet closest to citizens.

The first two parts of this series exposed the hollowness of a predetermined number of provinces and proposed a political census before boundaries are drawn. The concluding question is institutional: how can Pakistan bring government closer to citizens without weakening its federal compact? The answer is reform without refounding. The 1973 Constitution can accommodate powerful local governments and consensual new provinces if each follows its own constitutional logic.

Article 140A of the Constitution commands every province to establish local government and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to elected representatives. In MQM-P v Federation, PLD 2022 SC 439, the Supreme Court treated this as an obligation to create meaningful, not ornamental, local authority. It recognised elected local government’s primacy in functions such as spatial planning where provincial agencies had occupied the field. The defect is not silence; it is a command framed too generally and violated too easily.

A limited amendment should give Article 140A enforceable content while leaving each province free to design institutions suited to its geography. It would set a constitutional floor, not create a federally administered third tier. It should guarantee a four-year term, elections before expiry and polls within 90 days of premature dissolution.

A council should be removable only for stated grounds, after hearing and through an order open to judicial review. Caretaker administration must be time-bound. The Election Commission’s recent proposal identifies the recurring device of last-minute changes in local laws and boundaries; a one-year legislative freeze before scheduled polls should close it.

Constitutional protection must attach functions to institutions. A minimum schedule should reserve spatial planning, building control, water and sanitation, waste management, local roads, municipal transport, fire services, markets, parks and neighbourhood amenities to elected local government.

Provinces may add community-facing health, education and welfare functions according to capacity. A department should not duplicate a transferred function through an authority controlled from the provincial secretariat. Shared functions require written standards, a lead institution and a published dispute mechanism.

Money must follow those functions. Each province needs a permanent and professionally staffed Provincial Finance Commission (PFC), an award at fixed intervals, annual indexation between awards and public release of the formula, calculations, transfers and arrears.

The local share should be a charge upon the Provincial Consolidated Fund, not a discretionary grant released to political allies. Distribution must combine population with deprivation, service cost, area or density, revenue effort and climate vulnerability. Equalisation is not charity: it is how a federation makes comparable basic services possible where tax capacity differs.

Transfers alone would reproduce dependency at a lower level. Elected councils require own-source revenue: recurrent property taxation, development and betterment charges, parking and congestion instruments, protected user charges and appropriate fees.

Councils should set rates within provincial bands and bear the political cost of collection. Updated property registers, transparent valuation and simple digital payment can broaden the base; exemptions must protect low-income households, not privileged properties. The international principle is elementary: local resources should be commensurate with local responsibilities.

Autonomy cannot mean immunity from scrutiny. Every council should publish an annual budget, quarterly execution, procurement contracts, staffing, assets, audited accounts and a small set of comparable service indicators. Council meetings and committee votes should be open, with enforceable conflict-of-interest rules and a local complaints mechanism.

Provincial supervision should be confined to legality, audit, minimum standards and correction of serious failure. It should not extend to prior approval of routine decisions or removal of an elected mayor by executive displeasure.

Metropolitan Pakistan requires a distinct design. Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi-Islamabad, Peshawar and Quetta cannot be governed by departments whose boundaries do not match the city people use.

Each functional urban area needs an elected mayor and council responsible for integrated land use, transport, water, waste, resilience and economic planning, with elected wards below. Utilities may retain technical form, but their plans, budgets and chief executives must answer to the metropolitan government. Comparative evidence shows that fragmented transport and land-use authority weakens coherence, accountability and implementation.

Rural government should not be a miniature copy of the metropolis. Union, tehsil and district councils need responsibilities matched to settlement patterns: local roads, drainage, water, agricultural support, markets and oversight of nearby facilities.

Mountain, coastal, desert, frontier and formerly tribal areas may need asymmetric arrangements and inter-district bodies for services that exceed one council’s scale. Subsidiarity means assigning a task to the lowest level capable of performing it; it does not mean imposing one institutional diagram upon every place.

Islamabad offers a lawful federal test. Parliament has exclusive legislative power over the capital territory and can establish a directly elected metropolitan government with a secure term, defined functions, revenue assignments and transparent transfers. Such a model would carry more conviction than federal lectures to provinces. It must not become another experiment in postponement: the repeated delay of local elections in the capital and the provinces demonstrates why election dates and legal stability require constitutional protection.

National coordination must respect federal discipline. A voluntary intergovernmental charter endorsed by all provinces can set comparable principles; the Council of Common Interests may coordinate its aspects linked to Part II of the Federal Legislative List.

The National Economic Council (NEC) should incorporate district and metropolitan service indicators into planning, while the NFC recognises the cost of functions financed below. Federal grants for national objectives should follow published criteria through agreed channels. Direct financing of favoured districts or cities would replace provincial discretion with federal patronage, not create self-government.

Provincehood must remain a separate track. A statutory, multiparty Federal Reorganisation Commission should receive claims, not invent them. Using the political census proposed in Part II, it should publish a dossier on consent, territory, minorities, capacity, revenues and expenditure, assets and liabilities, water and resources, representation and transition.

It must compare the proposed province with empowered local and regional government inside existing boundaries. South Punjab, Hazara and other claims would be judged on evidence, not squeezed into a centrally announced quota.

For a blanket nationwide redesign, Parliament should first require two uninterrupted local elections and at least five years of comparable financial and service data. That period would reveal which grievances arise from provincial scale and which from withheld local authority.

It would also supply credible estimates for new units. Mature claims need not be buried by the timetable: where durable regional consent and the viability tests are already established, the commission may report earlier. The decisive legal safeguard remains Article 239(4), including the two-thirds approval of the affected provincial assembly.

Implementation need not await a grand bargain. Within six months, Parliament and the provinces can agree limited Article 140A and electoral amendments. Within one year, provincial laws can assign functions, secure terms and constitute independent PFCs.

The following budgets should transfer staff, records, assets and money together; the Election Commission should publish a protected calendar; and an open-data standard should make district performance comparable. The reorganisation commission can begin receiving claims without prejudging any boundary.

This package changes the incentives behind the impasse. Provinces would retain protected autonomy from Islamabad but could no longer invoke federalism to centralise power at home. Local representatives would gain authority and revenue, with visible responsibility for taxation and results. Genuine provincehood claims would receive a lawful evidentiary route rather than periodic promises. Citizens could identify who controls a service, who finances it and whom to remove when it fails.

Pakistan’s history alternates between central plans that use local bodies to bypass provinces and provincial governments that keep local democracy weak. A durable federation must reject both. Its strength will not be measured by preserving four provinces forever or multiplying them to an elegant number. It will be measured by whether consent governs territorial change and power reaches citizens with resources and accountability attached. That is the federal compact Pakistan needs: constitutional at the centre, autonomous in the provinces and democratic from below.

[Concluded]

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Huzaima Bukhari, lawyer and author, has been Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Senior Visiting Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE). She also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 2003.

Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds an LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.