A MAP IS NEVER JUST an outline of land; it is a ledger of who counts. For three quarters of a century, Pakistan has lived inside four oversized provinces that hoard power at their capitals and starve their peripheries. Talk of a 28th Amendment and a twelve province federation may still be travelling through WhatsApp chats and speculative tweets, not white paper and parliamentary draft; yet the political imagination it has unlocked is worth taking seriously, and worth defending as a vision of a better state.
At its heart, the idea is simple. A country of more than 240 million cannot be run as if it were a modest federation of four gentlemen’s estates. Punjab is larger than many countries; Sindh stretches from Karachi’s vertical concrete to Thar’s horizontal sand; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa houses both Hazara’s Hindko towns and Waziristan’s scarred mountains; Balochistan is a continent in everything but name. Smaller provinces are not a threat to unity; they are an overdue admission that dignity requires scale that human beings can actually reach. A province whose capital is a day’s drive away is a promise; a province whose capital is a night’s bus ride and a lifetime’s indifference away is a warning.
Consider Islamabad as a standalone province. On paper it is already the federal capital territory; in practice it acts as a city without a hinterland, tethered administratively to distant Rawalpindi and symbolically to the rest of Pakistan. Fold Mirpur and its surrounding catchment into an Islamabad anchored province, or at the very least redraw adjoining units so that Mirpur is not an orphan of cartography, and a decade old demand becomes suddenly attainable: a proper international airport for British Kashmiri families who have spent generations shuttling between the Midlands and Mangla. British MPs have already written to Islamabad for precisely this facility; Mirpur’s name has appeared in Westminster debates and on GB News monologues, not Pakistani planning documents. A provincial government whose very legitimacy depends on diaspora votes and remittances would be hard pressed to ignore that any longer.
The same logic of scale and focus works in Punjab. A West Punjab built around Lahore, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Sialkot would allow Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz to govern a core industrial corridor as a coherent economic project rather than as a jealous landlord guarding distant estates. The textile mills of Faisalabad, the export factories of Sialkot, the logistics sprawl of Lahore and the agro industry of Gujranwala belong on a single investment map, serviced by a single provincial bureaucracy that wakes up every morning thinking about freight corridors, airports, export processing zones and skills colleges. Maryam’s early experiments with a provincial airline and laptop schemes show an appetite for activist governance; a smaller, richer West Punjab would give that activism a defined canvas and a clearer balance sheet.
To the south, the case for a South Punjab province has long been made in the language of neglect. The Saraiki movement did not begin with Twitter; it began in the 1970s, with poets and lawyers who were tired of watching roads, hospitals and universities stop at the invisible line of “upper” Punjab. The creation of a South Punjab secretariat was an acknowledgement that Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan and the belt around them needed their own administrative centre; it was also a half measure, quickly hollowed out when real powers were pulled back to Lahore. A full South Punjab province would turn that halfway house into a real home. Its capital could finally be a Saraiki city that issues orders, not just receives them; its Provincial Finance Commission would be constitutionally bound to spend where the poor actually live.
Bahawalpur deserves even more. It is not just “southern Punjab”; it is the ghost of a vanished kingdom that acceded to Pakistan early, poured money into the newborn state and then saw its royal dignity folded unceremoniously into One Unit. A Bahawalpur province is not nostalgia; it is justice. The old state already had a capital, a history of philanthropy in Lahore and a political class that understands both local land and national stakes. Restoring Bahawalpur as a province alongside South Punjab would honour that history while giving the desert districts a government that operates at their scale. One could imagine a Bahawalpur development forum, structured as a provincial echo of the Special Investment Facilitation Council yet anchored in an elected cabinet, pulling in investment for canals, solar arrays and desert agriculture rather than leaving the region to charity and chance.
Potohar, too, has waited its turn. For decades, Potohari families in Britain have watched planes fly over their ancestral villages on the way to Islamabad Airport, while local infrastructure has remained stubbornly second class. PMLN politicians themselves once demanded a Potohar province, citing the injustice of a resource rich plateau that still sends its citizens to Lahore for basic administrative matters. A Potohar province centred on Rawalpindi would finally treat the region as something more than a recruiting ground for the army and a construction site for Islamabad. It would force any ruling party to think concretely about rail upgrades, expressways, industrial estates in Attock and Chakwal, and, yes, about airports that serve the communities who have long subsidised Britain’s taxi ranks and Pakistan’s remittance line. A simple rule holds: where people can see their capital on the horizon, they are far less likely to see the state as an occupier.
The proposed unbundling of Sindh into Karachi, Sindh and a third unit often described as Mehran may sound radical, yet it simply puts cartography in line with reality. Karachi is already a megacity state in all but name; it generates a disproportionate share of Pakistan’s tax receipts, yet lives in permanent political deadlock between provincial and municipal hands. Separating Karachi as its own province would treat it the way other federations treat economic engines: like Istanbul, Budapest or Berlin, a city that is a province, with a budget to match its responsibilities. Interior Sindh, freed into a smaller Sindh and perhaps a Mehran province around Sukkur and the upper Indus, could finally receive attention on its own terms; Jacobabad, Larkana and Khairpur deserve budgets designed for their canals and climate, not for Clifton’s real estate.
Khyber and Hazara have their own stories of imbalance. The Hazara Province Movement dates back to the 1950s; its demand is not separatism, but a seat at the table. Hindko speaking towns, mixed ethnic valleys and long neglected hill districts have for decades felt that decisions about their roads, hospitals and jobs are taken too far away, by politicians speaking in a different idiom for a different base. A Hazara province, alongside a Khyber province built around Peshawar and the Pakhtun belt, would regularise what is already true on the ground: this region contains at least two distinct political economies, and only a map that admits that can allocate development fairly. When people carry banners for “Subah Hazara”, they are really asking a simpler question; who, precisely, is answerable when our bridge collapses or our school is never built.
Nowhere would the benefits of redrawing be more obvious than in Balochistan. For years, reports have documented the province’s catastrophic social indicators; higher multidimensional poverty than any other province, widespread malnutrition, fragile health and education systems, a state presence that is often felt more through checkpoints than clinics. Balochistan is too large to be governed as a single administrative unit from Quetta; its coastal belt, mountain districts and resource rich interiors all require different strategies. Splitting the province into a landlocked Balochistan and a coastal Gwadar province would allow budgets, policing and development plans to be tailored to radically different realities, while making it harder for any government to hide failures behind the sheer size of the map.
A separate Gwadar province, in particular, would drag CPEC out of abstraction and into accountability. The new Gwadar International Airport and the port have become symbols of both promise and frustration; China and Pakistan celebrate them as critical nodes of the Belt and Road Initiative, yet many locals see empty terminals, fenced off land and a sea of unmet promises. A coastal province whose government must face Gwadar’s fishermen and small traders every election cycle would be far better placed to insist that public private partnerships deliver local jobs, clean water and electricity, not just strategic depth and photographs of ribbon cuttings. It would also offer investors something they crave; a compact, specialised regulatory environment, focused on ports, logistics, tourism and maritime industries, rather than a distant provincial capital juggling dozens of competing priorities.
Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan sit slightly apart from this conversation, yet any serious redrawing of Pakistan’s internal map will have to address their ambiguity as well. Both regions live in a twilight between internal autonomy and unresolved international dispute, with constitutional arrangements that can feel provisional and incomplete. A new provinces framework could, if handled with care, provide them with clearer internal representation in national finance and planning forums; representation in an expanded Council of Common Interests and meaningful seats in a strengthened Provincial Finance Commission architecture. That would require diplomacy, legal finesse and respect for international commitments, but it would also recognise that constitutional limbo has a human cost.
Critics will insist that new provinces mean more politicians, more bureaucrats, more flags and more motorcades. The answer should be very clear; if this exercise produces only new elites and old habits, it will have failed. The case for twelve provinces stands or falls on one institutional hinge; whether the devolution of territory is matched by a rigorous redesign of Provincial Finance Commissions, district councils, and new investment forums modelled on the federal SIFC yet anchored in provincial assemblies and subject to transparent scrutiny. A West Punjab or Hazara or Gwadar that collects more revenue but does not share more power downward is not a reform; it is a rebranding.
Yet the potential is real. A Pakistan of twelve provinces is easier to imagine as a Pakistan of dozens of serious cities; Multan, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Bahawalpur, Gwadar, Abbottabad, Mirpur and others not as supplicants to distant capitals, but as capitals in their own right. Each with its own local public private partnerships, its own district level fiscal contracts, its own incentive to compete for investment, talent and trust. In that federation, it would be much harder to dismiss the demands of a British Kashmiri for an airport in Mirpur, a Baloch farmer for irrigation in his tehsil, a Saraiki student for a university in her town, a Hazarewal shopkeeper for a road that does not wash away each monsoon.
Four provinces were an inheritance; twelve provinces would be a choice. The old map was drawn for imperial convenience, then stretched over a modern republic that has outgrown it. The new map would be drawn, for once, to match where Pakistanis actually live, work and fly. If the 28th Amendment does eventually land on the table in something like its rumoured form, the test will not be whether the colours on the atlas look neat. The test will be simpler, and far more demanding; will a child born in Mirpur, Multan or Makran feel that the capital of her province is finally close enough to hear her voice. ∎
