ISLAMABAD (The Thursday Times) — Pakistan could have as many as 12 provinces, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said on Sunday, as long as they are drawn for administration and not along lines of language, ethnicity or party. On the same day the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan, a partner in the federal coalition, renewed its call for new administrative units in Sindh and announced a march in Karachi for November 29. The idea has been circling since July, when Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said the existing system had failed and needed a reset, and Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal later proposed 12 to 15 provinces. No plan or bill has been published. But the debate keeps returning, so it is worth setting out what any new map would have to get through: a high constitutional bar, a Senate built on equality between provinces, a finance formula that divides money by four, and a province that has already said no.
Why the idea keeps coming back
The case for smaller provinces starts with size. The 2023 census counted 241.5 million Pakistanis. Punjab alone has 127.7 million people, more than Japan. Sindh has 55.7 million, more than most European countries, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 40.9 million. Only Balochistan, with 14.9 million people spread across nearly half the country’s land, is of a size that many federations would recognise as a single province.
People per province, 2023 census
Source: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Islamabad Capital Territory, with 2.4 million people, is not a province.
Supporters of new provinces argue that a chief minister in Lahore cannot govern Rajanpur as well as one closer to it, and that the people of south Punjab, Hazara or urban Sindh wait too long for decisions made in distant capitals. Asif put the complaint in terms of money and power. Funds transferred by the federal government, he said, stay at the discretion of provincial governments, even when they are meant for local institutions, which still depend on the provinces for their budgets and authority.
Pakistan’s provinces are unusually large by international standards.
Average people per state or province, approximate
Rounded estimates: national population divided by the number of first-level units, excluding federal territories. Units differ greatly in powers, so this measures size, not autonomy.
The comparison has limits. Turkey’s provinces are run largely from Ankara, while Pakistan’s have wide powers since the 18th AmendmentThe 2010 constitutional amendment that moved many powers, from education to health, from the federal government to the provinces, and strengthened their share of revenue. of 2010. But size explains why the idea has support across parties.
The bar the Constitution sets
Changing Pakistan’s provinces is not a matter for a cabinet decision, an ordinance or a referendum. Article 1 of the Constitution names the provinces, so adding one means amending the Constitution. Under Article 239, an amendment needs the votes of two-thirds of the total membership of each house of Parliament. Then comes the clause that matters most. Article 239(4)The clause saying a constitutional amendment that changes a province’s limits cannot go to the President for assent unless that province’s own assembly has passed it by two-thirds of its total membership. says that an amendment altering the limits of a province cannot be sent to the President unless the assembly of that province has also passed it by two-thirds of its total membership.
The third step is the one that has stopped every past attempt. It gives each province a veto over its own division. Some reports this year have spoken of a nationwide referendum. A referendum could show what the public thinks, but it could not stand in for those votes. Nor could a simple majority in Parliament, however large the government’s coalition.
“Article 239(4) gives each province a veto over its own division. It is the clause that has stopped every past attempt.”
What has been tried before
Asif himself pointed to history. In 1955 the provinces and states of West Pakistan were merged into a single province under the One UnitThe 1955 scheme that merged the provinces and princely states of West Pakistan into one province, to balance East Pakistan. It was dissolved in 1970. scheme. The experiment bred resentment in the smaller provinces and was dissolved in 1970, when the four provinces were restored and the old state of Bahawalpur was folded into Punjab. That memory still shapes suspicion of any redrawn map in Sindh and Balochistan.
The map, and attempts to change it
The closest Pakistan has come to a new province was in 2012 and 2013. On May 9, 2012, the Punjab Assembly passed two resolutions, one for restoring Bahawalpur as a province and one for a new province in south Punjab, with the support of both treasury and opposition. A parliamentary commission then drafted a constitutional amendment for a single province called Bahawalpur Janoobi Punjab, made up of the Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan divisions and the Bhakkar and Mianwali districts. The Senate passed it by a two-thirds majority in March 2013. It went no further. The government of the day did not have two-thirds in the National Assembly, and the Punjab Assembly’s main party rejected the commission’s plan. Later governments created a south Punjab secretariat instead, an administrative office rather than a province.
The one successful change ran the other way. In 2018 the 25th AmendmentThe 2018 constitutional amendment that merged the Federally Administered Tribal Areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. merged the former tribal areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the provincial assembly approved it as Article 239(4) requires. It shows the procedure can work when the main parties and the affected province agree. It also shows how rare that agreement is.
Sindh has already said no
That agreement does not exist in Sindh. On September 4 the Sindh Assembly passed a resolution rejecting any attempt to divide the province or create new administrative units, and asked that it be sent to the President, the Prime Minister and the presiding officers of Parliament. The MQM-P boycotted the session. The Pakistan Peoples Party, which governs Sindh, holds a two-thirds majority in the house on its own, which under Article 239(4) is enough to block any change to the province’s limits. Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah has said there will be “no compromise on Sindh’s geographical unity”, and party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said last month that the assembly had put a “full stop” to the matter.
The chief minister has drawn one distinction worth noting. He has said he has no objection to more administrative units for better governance, such as divisions and districts, but that units with their own assemblies, chief executives and wide powers would in effect be new provinces. The MQM-P, for its part, insists that its demand is administrative and not ethnic. Each side suspects the other’s map.
“A Sindh divided in two would hold one sixth of the provincial seats in a 12-province Senate, not one quarter.”
The Senate arithmetic
The reason smaller provinces resist is not only identity. It is arithmetic. The Senate gives every province the same 23 seats, whatever its population, and Islamabad has four, for 96 in all. That equality is the main protection the smaller provinces have against Punjab’s weight in the National Assembly, where seats follow population. Punjab has about 53 per cent of Pakistan’s people but only 24 per cent of the Senate.
Media reports this year described one possible layout: Punjab split into four provinces, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan into three each, and Sindh into two. The government has not published any such plan. But if it were adopted with equal Senate seats for every province, the regions of today’s Punjab would hold a third of the provincial seats. Sindh’s share would fall from a quarter to a sixth.
Share of provinces’ Senate seats
Assumes every province keeps an equal number of seats. The layout is one described in media reports; the government has not published any plan. Islamabad’s seats are left out.
Twelve provinces of 23 senators each would also mean a house of 280, or a redesign of how the Senate is elected. Every new province would need its own assembly and high court, and constituencies would have to be redrawn. All of it would need the two-thirds majorities described above.
The money
The other formula that new provinces would break is the NFC awardThe National Finance Commission award, which decides how federal tax revenue is shared between the federal government and the provinces, and among the provinces.. Under the seventh award, agreed in 2009, the provinces receive 57.5 per cent of the divisible pool of federal taxes. That share is split among them by a formula in which population carries 82 per cent of the weight, with poverty, revenue and inverse population density making up the rest.
Provinces’ shares of their 57.5% under the NFC award
Source: seventh National Finance Commission award. The federal government keeps 42.5 per cent of the divisible pool.
New provinces would need a new award, and new awards are hard to reach. The seventh has stayed in force for well over a decade because the federation and the provinces could not agree on an eighth. The federal government, short of money, wants the formula revisited. Adding provinces would reopen every part of that bargain at once, along with the cost of new capitals, secretariats, assemblies and courts.
The other route on the table
Iqbal has offered an alternative to new provinces: empowered governments in about 160 districts. Asif’s complaint points the same way. The Constitution already requires every province, under Article 140AThe constitutional clause requiring each province to set up elected local governments and give them political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority., to establish local governments and hand them political, administrative and financial authority. In practice they have often been suspended, delayed or starved of funds.
This route does not need a two-thirds majority in any assembly. It needs provincial governments to give up money and power to districts and cities, guaranteed by provincial finance awards that cannot be withdrawn at will. That is hard in its own way, because it asks provincial leaders to share control. But it redraws no border, and the MQM-P has itself made the coming local government elections one of its top priorities.
“Local government needs no two-thirds majority. It needs provinces willing to share money and power.”
What to watch
Three things will show whether this round of the debate goes further than the last. The first is whether any party tables a constitutional amendment with a map attached. The second is the MQM-P’s march on November 29 and the PPP’s response, which will show whether the issue becomes a fight in the streets of Karachi or stays in television studios. The third is what happens to local government. If Punjab and Sindh hold local elections on time and give elected councils real budgets, much of the case for new provinces will have been met by other means.
The underlying problem is real. Provinces of 40, 55 and 128 million people are hard to govern from one capital, and citizens in their far corners feel it. But the Constitution was written so that no province could be divided without its own consent, and that protection was one of the lessons of One Unit. Any plan that ignores it will stall where the Bahawalpur Janoobi Punjab bill stalled in 2013. Any plan that respects it will have to begin not with a map, but with an agreement.
