KARACHI: A proposal to break Pakistan’s four large provinces into smaller administrative units has revived debate over whether greater devolution could improve governance and public services, and whether the cash-strapped state can afford the additional bureaucracies it could create.

Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal this week proposed either creating 15 provinces or empowering 160 district governments, arguing Pakistan needed a major overhaul of its governance system to reverse deteriorating socioeconomic indicators.

Iqbal is the second senior member of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government to raise the prospect of new provinces after Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi recently backed the idea. Creating new provinces would require constitutional amendments and broad political agreement over issues including political representation and the distribution of federal revenues.

Pakistan, a country of more than 240 million people, is divided into four provinces, Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, that vary enormously in population and geography. Its most recent major territorial reorganization came in 2018, when seven formerly semi-autonomous tribal districts along the Afghan border were merged into the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Eight years later, provincial officials say the financial arrangements underpinning that merger remain unresolved. Pakistan’s National Finance Commission (NFC) Award determines how federally collected revenues are distributed between Islamabad and the provinces, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa says its share has not been adequately adjusted to account for the additional population and development needs it inherited.

“The financial merger is pending due to non-inclusion in the NFC Award,” Muzzammil Aslam, finance adviser to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, told Arab News.

“There should not be a decision until the financial feasibility and economic stability is done.”

Aslam, who is affiliated with the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan which rules KP, said the experience of the tribal districts demonstrated the difficulties Pakistan could face if it embarked on a much larger administrative reorganization.

“FATA is suffering due to a development lag,” he said. “Imagine, in 8 years they have not sorted just one merger. How can they do it when 15 provinces split?”

Proposals for new provinces have periodically surfaced in Pakistan and are politically contentious, with debates often intersecting with questions of ethnicity, language, political representation and the distribution of federal resources.

Supporters of smaller administrative units argue they could bring government closer to citizens, improve public services and infrastructure and make officials more accountable, while critics point to the cost of creating additional provincial administrations and the potential for political and ethnic disputes.

Rehan Hanif, president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said greater devolution should be the central objective of any restructuring.

“The basic spirit of it is that there should be devolution of power and the powers should go down,” he told Arab News, while acknowledging the additional financial burden.

“Obviously, if you make more provinces, then the financial expenses will have to be incurred.”

Hanif said better infrastructure and quicker resolution of public problems could ultimately benefit economic activity.

“Obviously, when people’s problems start getting solved, and the infrastructure starts getting better, then it also has an effect on the economy,” he said.

Khaqan Najeeb, a former adviser to Pakistan’s finance ministry and an economist, said Islamabad should focus first on strengthening existing mechanisms for decentralization, including the NFC Award and provincial finance commissions, which distribute resources from provincial governments to lower tiers of government.

He said only 4.7 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product was spent locally and argued that empowering local governments could improve service delivery.

“In that, you also have to think about what the provincial setups have to be,” Najeeb told Arab News.

He said Pakistan could consider establishing an independent commission to examine possible administrative restructuring, taking into account governance, language and ethnicity, with a separate province in southern Punjab among the possibilities.

Najeeb said Pakistan ultimately needed a system centered on competitive, empowered cities capable of delivering services more effectively.

“If in the next three to five years, Pakistan is able to put this kind of framework together, things in terms of governance, whether it’s economic, social, should start looking much better,” he said.