Every time I see the latest census numbers, I come back to the same question. How is one province supposed to run itself with 127.6 million people in it? That is Punjab’s population as of the 2023 census, up from 110 million just six years earlier, a growth rate of roughly 2.53 per cent a year. For context, that is more people than live in Japan. More than Germany, France, and the United Kingdom combined. More than any single country in Europe outside Russia. And it is all run out of Lahore.
I do not think that works anymore, if it ever really did. The case for breaking Pakistan’s largest provinces into smaller, more workable units is not ideological to me. It is arithmetic.
Start with distance, because that is where most of the frustration actually lives. Punjab has 41 districts spread across 10 divisions, and some of them are enormous on their own; Bahawalpur district alone stretches across nearly 24830 square kilometres. If you are a farmer in Rahim Yar Khan or you need a hospital bed in Dera Ghazi Khan, you are not dealing with your own town’s government. You are routing everything through Multan or Lahore, hundreds of kilometres away. Every kilometre of that distance adds delay, adds cost, and honestly, adds opportunity for corruption. Shrink the distance between citizens and the office that can actually solve their problem, and all three shrink with it.
Then there is the paperwork, which nobody likes to talk about but which quietly defines how a state functions. Pakistan added over six million households between the 2017 and 2023 censuses, going from 32.2 million to 38.3 million. Each of those households will, at some point, need something processed. A birth certificate. A land title. A police report. A school seat. Four enormous provinces trying to process the paperwork of 241 million people simply cannot give each file the attention that ten or fifteen smaller units could. Smaller units mean smaller queues, and smaller queues mean things actually get done.
Accountability is the part I find most convincing, though. When your provincial capital is an hour or two away instead of a full day’s journey, you can actually watch what your government is doing. Officials cannot hide behind distance and scale the way they can now. We already know this works, because Pakistan proved it in 2010, when the 18th Amendment devolved real power from the federal government down to the provinces. I have never understood why we would treat that as the finish line rather than the first step. The same logic, extended one level further, from province to smaller, well-funded unit, produces the same benefits.
Then there is the fairness question, where much of Pakistan’s real political tension lives. South Punjab, Hazara, interior Sindh- these are regions that have argued for years that their share of the provincial budget does not reflect their population or their needs, because the people making those decisions are focused on Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar. Give these regions their own budgets and their own elected leadership, and they stop competing for scraps of attention inside a province that was never built with them in mind.
None of this is a call to break the country apart. It is a call to build a government sized for the country we actually have, one that added nearly 34 million people in six years and shows no sign of slowing down.
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