The Punjabi oligopoly: The geography of Pakistan's welfare divide

Pakistan's welfare state is not a national institution. It is a provincial one in national clothing. Punjab, by virtue of demographic mass, political weight, and inherited institutional advantage, has accumulated a disproportionate share of the country's capacity to deliver social protection.

The result is a federation in which a citizen's eligibility for the basic protections of modern statehood depends not on their need but on their postcode. This is no accident. It is the product of a federal fiscal design that rewards population over poverty, a political economy in which Punjab governs Pakistan, and a devolution settlement that handed responsibility to the provinces without handing them the means to discharge it.

The 18th Amendment of 2010 was meant to fix the country's over-centralisation. It devolved social welfare, health, and education to the provinces on the theory that capacity sits closer to need at the provincial level.

In practice, devolution transferred responsibility without transferring the fiscal and bureaucratic capacity required to discharge it. Punjab inherited a mature provincial bureaucracy. Balochistan inherited the obligation to build one.

The mechanism that distributes federal money is the National Finance Commission Award. Under the 7th NFC of 2009, the provincial share of the divisible pool was set at 57.5 per cent and split by a formula weighting population at 82 per cent.

The output is fixed: Punjab receives 51.74 per cent of the provincial pool, Sindh 24.55 per cent, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa 14.62 per cent, and Balochistan 9.09 per cent. For 2024-25 that meant roughly 3.7 trillion rupees transferred to Punjab against 668 billion to Balochistan, a province that covers nearly half the country's landmass.

These numbers look like neutral arithmetic. They are not. The 82 per cent population weight imports an existing inequality and converts it into a recurring fiscal one. Punjab has more people partly because it has, for decades, received more investment, more functioning institutions, and more of the post-Partition resettlement and Green Revolution infrastructure that produced demographic growth in the first place.

The formula now ensures the state continues to spend where it has historically spent. Population-weighted distribution is facially equitable and structurally regressive. The 7th NFC was meant to last five years. It is now in its sixteenth.

The political architecture compounds the disparity. Punjab holds 173 of the National Assembly's 336 seats; no federal government can form without it. The flagship programmes meant to compensate for provincial unevenness, the Benazir Income Support Programme, Pakistan Bait-ul-Maal, and the now-superseded Ehsaas, are operationally densest in Punjab, where the banking, NADRA, and bureaucratic infrastructure required to deliver them already exists.

The result is a feedback loop: political weight produces fiscal priority, fiscal priority produces institutional capacity, and visible delivery produces more political weight.

Welfare disparity becomes most visible in public health, where structural neglect can end lives. Pakistan has welfare deserts the size of small countries, regions where formal social protection falls below any meaningful threshold of accessibility. Balochistan has the lowest social sector spending per capita in the federation.

The Oxford Policy Management evaluation of BISP found the programme reduced poverty in recipient households by 7 percentage points and lowered Multidimensional Poverty Index scores from 31 to 23 per cent. The numbers are real. They also confirm an uncomfortable truth: the precondition for participation is being legible to the state, and legibility is more reliably available in Punjab.

No group sits at a sharper end of this geography than persons with disabilities. The 1998 census recorded the country's PWD population at 2.38 per cent. The 2017 census, conducted in a country whose population had grown by more than 60 million, recorded 0.48 per cent. Pakistan, on its own statistical apparatus, would have us believe that disability fell by roughly 80 per cent in two decades. The figure is not a measurement of disability. It is a measurement of the state's reluctance to count.

The World Health Organisation estimates that roughly 15 per cent of any population has some form of disability, a figure the UNDP's 2020 Pakistan National Human Development Report endorses. Applied to Pakistan's 241.5 million population, this implies a PWD population of approximately 36 million. The British Council and Economist Intelligence Unit have placed the cost of their economic exclusion at between 4.9 and 6.3 per cent of GDP, or up to 33 million dollars in foregone economic activity every single day. Undercounting is not a neutral statistical failure. It is the mechanism through which a population is removed from the calculus of governance.

In 2024, the Government of Punjab launched the Himmat Card. The programme provides a quarterly stipend of 10,500 rupees to certified persons with disabilities, disbursed through Bank of Punjab ATM cards, with 30 per cent of slots reserved for women. Initial rollout covered 65,000 beneficiaries, with subsequent expansion targeting 85,000. The stipend is modest, but the floor is the point.

What makes the Himmat Card structurally distinct is the card itself. ATM-based disbursement removes the most corrosive feature of charity-based welfare in South Asia, the discretion of the local intermediary. There is no clerk to bribe, no relative to defer to, no ward councillor whose patronage the recipient must enter. Underneath the card sits the Disabled Persons Management Information System, a digital registry of certified PWDs integrated with NADRA. It is the only disability registry of its scale operating anywhere in Pakistan. The DPMIS proves that a Pakistani provincial government can build this infrastructure if it chooses to. No other province has chosen.

Applied across the federation, the WHO's prevalence figure yields an estimated 17 to 18 million PWDs living outside Punjab. The combined number of those people currently reached by any provincial disability cash transfer programme is zero. There is one such programme in Pakistan. It runs in one province. It serves one in twenty of the country's persons with disabilities.

Article 38(d) of the Constitution obliges the state to provide the basic necessities of life to citizens unable to earn their livelihood by reason of infirmity. The Article contains no geographic qualifier. It does not say "for citizens in Punjab."

This is not an anti-Punjab argument. The Himmat Card is a Punjabi policy innovation, designed by Punjabi administrators, executed by a Punjabi government, and it works. The argument is that the model Punjab built is too good to remain exclusive, and that a welfare state which functions in only one of a country's provinces is not a welfare state. It is a provincial programme operating under national branding.

The geography of welfare in Pakistan is not weather. It is not topography. It is not the irreducible fact of the country's federal form. It is a political choice, made repeatedly, held in place by the institutional and electoral incentives that have made Pakistan what it is. What is made by political choice can be unmade by it. The men and women in Quetta, in Skardu, and in Gwadar are not asking for charity. They ask only for the country to count them.