The low hanging fruit

The question of new provinces is back in the news, and it deserves a fair hearing. But almost everything we know about smaller provinces in Pakistan comes from modelling, not lived experience. Even our one true precedent cuts the other way. The One Unit scheme of 1955 merged the four provinces of the western wing into a single block, the opposite of a split, and it fell apart within fifteen years under the very grudges a fresh carve-up now risks stirring in reverse. Large-scale redrawing of the map is uncharted water, thick with moving parts we can only guess at, not measure.

There is one tier of government on which we do hold real data, gathered at real scale, more than once. Pervez Musharraf built the version most of us remember, a full district system, with elected nazims and coordination officers standing in for deputy commissioners, and commissioners struck off the map altogether. It was not the first attempt. Ayub Khan had tried something similar decades earlier, as Basic Democracies, a pyramid of some eighty thousand elected village representatives who in turn chose the president, meant to root power close to home while keeping it well fenced off from national politics. Both, notably, were drawn up under army rule and pushed down from the top rather than argued up from below. Both were, within a few years of a return to civilian rule, hollowed out or undone outright. That is not an accident. It is a pattern, and worth reading closely before we open a costlier, harder front elsewhere.

Consider what new capitals would and would not fix. They would bring the seat of power closer in miles. But the bureaucrat sitting in that office would still answer upward, to a chief secretary and a cabinet, not outward, to the town he serves. Being nearer is not the same thing as being answerable. Local government, done properly, is the one design meant to close that second gap rather than merely shorten the first. New provinces cannot do that work in its place, however many of them we draw.

Nor would fresh boundaries fix the second flaw, which is one of raw skill. A civil service still built on generalists, moved from a land desk to a health department to a customs post over a single career, does not gain the trained hands a growing province would need merely by being handed a smaller patch of ground to run. Splitting a weak structure into four weak structures does not, on its own, make any one of them strong. It only means the same shortage now shows up in four places instead of one, each too thin to cover for itself.

So why do we keep going back on the one tier of government we have already tried, more than once, and at meaningful scale? Ask a bureaucrat and you will hear talk of law and order, of coordination, of a state too poor and too young to trust its edges. Look at what actually happened and a plainer answer turns up. Devolution took the district away from the deputy commissioner and gave it, on paper, to an elected nazim. Within months of the end of military rule, provincial governments set about bringing the old titles back. Commissioners were restored first, in Punjab soon after the changeover, though for years afterwards the land revenue powers that once came with the post stayed with the newer offices devolution had created. The shell came back before the substance did. Elsewhere, Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa went further and rebuilt the whole ladder, deputy commissioner and all. What returned everywhere, sooner or later, was rank. What did not return, anywhere, was a working answer to the one flaw that had doomed devolution from the start: elected councils held no real purse, and nazims, themselves only indirectly chosen, answered to no watchdog closer than the province.

That flaw was never an oversight. A civil service asked to hand down power will, left to mark its own homework, hand down duty and keep the ledger. This is not a new insight, only a well-proven one. Nawaz Sharif's last government tasked Ahsan Iqbal with redesigning the entry exam and splitting recruits into proper streams for policy, finance and general work. It went nowhere. Years later, under a different government, Ishrat Husain led a task force through sixty-eight sessions and three thousand submissions and arrived, among much else, at the same fix: sort officers by what they can actually do. It also went nowhere, and one of his own team later called the whole exercise an eyewash unless the elite cadre's grip on senior posts was broken first. Two governments, two reformers, one idea, killed twice over by the very body asked to carry it out.

Picture a garrison manning the walls of an old fort, arrows nocked, eyes fixed on the horizon for invaders, while behind them the walls themselves are cracking and settling into the ground on their own account. The fort would come down whether or not the invaders ever arrived. That is our bureaucracy's posture towards reform. It treats every proposal to redesign it as an army at the gate, worth resisting to the last post and the last promotion, and it has never once turned round to notice that the structure it is defending is failing from within, regardless of who is laying siege to it.

Two forces are hastening that collapse right now, reform or no reform. The federal government alone counts close to six hundred thousand civil servants set against more than four hundred thousand pensioners already drawing on it, a ratio that worsens by the year. The pension bill has more than doubled in five years, from around four hundred and eighty billion rupees to just over a trillion, and now eats up more than one twentieth of all federal current spending. The Ministry of Finance has already formalised a funded scheme for new civil servants, ten per cent from their own pay matched by twelve from the exchequer, rather than handing them the old open-ended promise. And the prime minister's own office has just switched on an artificial intelligence tool built to track every directive from issuance to implementation, identify where progress has stalled and which office is responsible. The stated aim is not to replace civil servants but to help them. Fair enough. But a machine built to see exactly where coordination breaks down will, sooner or later, make plain how much of that coordination work never needed a whole rank of officers to begin with.

Before we seek to create new provinces, it is worth first removing the vestiges of an extractive, post-colonial bureaucracy designed for a very different and far more oppressive age.