The 33-province proposal avoids Pakistan’s most relevant comparison: its own smaller, resource-rich but institutionally weak regions.
The proposal to reorganise Pakistan into 33 federating units may never become a serious constitutional project. Its more immediate function may be political distraction: a dramatic debate over maps, capitals and identities that diverts attention away from rising disparities, resource capture, elite privilege, selective accountability, institutional decay, over-centralised power, and the deliberate failure to establish effective local government. That doesn’t mean the idea should be dismissed outright.
Even an impractical proposal can shape national debate. Once territorial restructuring is presented as a solution to instability, economic stagnation, and poor services, its underlying assumptions must be examined.
The proposal, introduced at a conference as an objective review of the current four-province system, suggests creating 33 new units and strengthening local government. It starts with the right question: do Pakistan’s problems stem from its borders or its institutions? It then points to elite capture, weak accountability, bureaucratic inefficiency, and over-centralisation as the core failures.
Yet the proposal focuses extensively on administrative redrawing, turning 33 divisions into provinces, with Islamabad remaining a federal territory, rather than on institutional reform. However, if the real problem is state capture, then multiplying provincial governments may only multiply the sites where that capture occurs.
Pakistan does not primarily suffer from a shortage of provinces. It suffers from a shortage of accountable power.We should view any proposal for constitutional cartography with deep historical skepticism, as such reforms rarely achieve their stated goals. For instance the One Unit scheme designed to establish parity between East and West Pakistan by consolidating the western provinces , it produced the exact opposite of its intent. Instead of leveling the political playing field, the scheme concentrated unprecedented authority onto the Centre, exacerbating the very sense of marginalisation and alienation.
The 33-unit formula appears to reverse One Unit’s logic, trading consolidation for fragmentation. Yet this shift in territorial direction does not escape the same fundamental error. Administrative devolution, in this scheme, serves only as a smokescreen; the Centre retains its grip on real power even as provincial boundaries multiply. In both cases, the underlying assumption is identical—that redrawing lines solves inequality—while the actual machinery of privilege continues operating unchallenged.
The first beneficiaries would not be citizens in need of water, sanitation, schools, hospitals, transport, justice, and responsive policing. Instead, they would be those positioned to occupy or influence new offices. New provinces mean new chief ministers, governors, ministers, assemblies, secretariats, bureaucracies, police commands, public-service commissions and regulatory structures.
The creation of new administrative units does not fundamentally redistribute state power; rather, it re-scales existing systems of privilege. For regional politicians unable to command the vast electoral or bureaucratic machinery of a large province, a smaller state offers a more manageable fiefdom, one where their influence can be consolidated rather than diluted.
Simultaneously senior bureaucrats view fragmentation as a mechanism for institutional advancement, unlocking new secretariat posts director-level promotions, and vertical career ladder that would otherwise remain blocked in a congested hierarchy. Contractors and property developers would benefit from new capitals, official residences, government complexes, roads, housing schemes and rezoning decisions. This would not dismantle elite capture. It would decentralise patronage without democratising power.
Yet the primary impetus for such restructuring often lies beyond the official registry. Private contractors, property developers, and real-estate interests are keenly aware that every new capital requires ministerial bungalows, high-rise secretariats, ring roads, and affordable-housing clusters—each project contingent upon rezoning ordinances and land-use conversions. These ancillary beneficiaries thus become active lobbying forces for subdivision, not passive observers.
Crucially, however, this process does not disturb the underlying architecture of elite control. It decentralises access to patronage—allocating contracts, postings, and permits across a wider geographic map—but it does not democratise power. Decision-making remains tied to the same kinship networks, corporate interests, and bureaucratic cliques that dominate the original provincial structure.
The result is not a devolution of authority to citizens, but a multiplication of rent-seeking nodes as we have seen during military dictators rule in 80s and 2000. In short, fragmentation multiplies the loci of patronage while preserving the very concentration of influence that reform rhetoric ostensibly seeks to dismantle.
The proposal claims that lean new secretariats could reduce staffing by 64 per cent and save approximately Rs318 billion annually. But those projected savings arise from consolidating departments, abolishing overlapping offices, imposing staffing norms and using shared services. None of these reforms requires 33 provinces.
The valid comparison is not between today’s bloated four-province system and an imagined, perfectly efficient multi-province system. It is between four reformed provinces with empowered local governments and 33 equally reformed provinces with the same local institutions. The proposal’s international evidence is similarly selective. It highlights successful countries with numerous states or provinces and presents Telangana and Uttarakhand in India as evidence that smaller successor units can perform well.
But it does not seriously examine fragile or conflict-affected countries that also possess numerous provinces, states or governorates. Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo demonstrate that a large number of territorial units is no guarantee of administrative capacity.
This does not mean numerous provinces cause state failure, just as the existence of 50 American states does not prove that territorial multiplication produces success. Strong institutions may allow a country to govern many constituent units. Many constituent units do not create strong institutions.
The country already possesses smaller, province-like governmental arrangements. Even more striking is the proposal’s omission of Pakistan’s most direct internal comparison of Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). Although neither is constitutionally a province, both possess their own governments, legislatures, bureaucracies and development frameworks, and are officially classified by federal planning documents as “special areas”. Yet the proposal main map and population data cover only the four provinces and Islamabad, leaving G-B and AJK entirely outside the proposed system. AJK does appear in the text, but only in passing, as a cautionary example of how an oversized cabinet and administrative establishment can crowd out development spending.
The proposal, however, fails to draw the full implication: AJK already shows that even a relatively small jurisdiction can reproduce elite privilege, fiscal dependence, bureaucratic bloat, and weak public services. That lesson was underscored in May 2024, when protests over subsidies on electricity and flour prices in AJK turned deadly. In response, the federal government approved a Rs24 billion grant to cover subsidies for electricity and wheat, a stark illustration of the very dysfunctions the proposal overlooks.
Gilgit-Baltistan presents a similar contradiction between territorial smallness, natural abundance and public deprivation. An Asian Development Bank assessment estimated that the region possessed approximately 50,000 megawatts of hydropower potential while continuing to suffer energy shortages that constrained economic activity.
Water abundance has not guaranteed safe drinking water either. An official Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources assessment found high proportions of unsafe samples in several GB districts, including 100 per cent of those tested in Astore and 80 per cent in Skardu and Hunza districts. Earlier assessments also identified limited access to safe water and substantial deficiencies in sanitation infrastructure in Gilgit-Baltistan.
These cases do not prove that small units must fail; they prove that smallness is not a substitute for governance. Rivers, dams and natural wealth do not automatically translate into reliable electricity, safe water or functioning sanitation. That transformation requires capable and accountable administration, transparent finance, and effective local government. By excluding GB and AJK from its central comparison, the proposal avoids Pakistan’s most relevant evidence. Their experience undermines the assumption that reducing territorial size will itself produce responsiveness.
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The establishment question should be framed in structural, not conspiratorial terms. The document offers no evidence that the military or federal establishment is actively driving the proposal. However, breaking large provinces into numerous smaller, fiscally dependent units could indeed strengthen the centre.
Weak provincial tax bases would leave new governments heavily reliant on federal transfers, administrative support and security coordination. Whereas, a few politically powerful provinces can bargain collectively with Islamabad, dozens of dependent units could be managed more easily through selective alliances, separate fiscal arrangements and bureaucratic leverage.
A more credible alternative already exists within the constitution. Article 140-A mandates that every province establish a local-government system and devolve political, administrative and financial authority to elected local representatives. Yet devolution consistently stalls at Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta. This resistance is not accidental: A new province creates additional ministerial posts, while effective municipalities strip power from existing incumbents.
Directly elected mayors with predictable budgets would weaken provincial control over development spending, appointments and local contracts. Formula-based transfers would reduce chief-ministerial discretion, and local oversight of municipal personnel would make service delivery failures visible and accountable. Provincial elites obstruct devolution; citizens experience governance as distant and unresponsive; the resulting dysfunction is blamed on provincial size; and more provinces are proposed as the solution. It is a self-fulfilling argument.
Pakistan should first establish effective local governments with protected local terms, timely elections, clearly assigned functions, predictable finance, control over personnel, transparent procurement and independent audit. This framework must be reinforced by professional policing, fixed civil-service tenure, functioning courts, progressive taxation, and disclosure of contracts and land decisions.
Only after these institutions have operated across more than one electoral cycle should provincial boundaries be reconsidered. The proposal’s own roadmap ultimately concedes this sequence: reform institutions, empower local government, verify fiscal and administrative capacity, and only then evaluate territorial restructuring.
Pakistan needs fewer distractions, not more provincial headquarters. The urgent task is not to redraw the map, but to dismantle the structure of privilege operating within it.
Fazal Ali Saadi, hailing from Gilgit-Baltistan’s Ishkoman Valley, is a development practitioner and researcher interested in understanding development-induced challenges of poverty and inequality.
The High Asia Herald is a member of High Asia Media Group — a window to High Asia and Central Asia