Is Pakistan's governance architecture, created by the British Raj and constitutionalised in 1973 for a country of about 60 million, still the right tool for governing a country of 241 million? If more, smaller provinces are that 'right tool', then the mechanisms of governance in the new provinces or administrative units are absolutely fundamental.
A badly designed split will be worse than no split. The federation is lopsided in two opposite ways.
Some units are too large to manage, and one is too sparse to serve. Public administration research is consistent on this: beyond a certain scale, the information and coordination costs of a single tier rise faster than the benefits of scale.
Provincial secretariats have become bottlenecks, and district officers answer to capitals that cannot see them. The fiscal-federalism logic of subsidiarity points strongly to shifting resources to smaller units.
The 18th Amendment (2010) and the Seventh National Finance Commission Award (2009) devolved substantial resources and functions from the federal government to the provinces, using a complex formula that weighted population at 82 per cent but went beyond. But look at what happened next.
Devolution ceased at the provincial capital. Within provinces, transfers to districts became discretionary.
The 18th Amendment and the NFC in practice built a rules-based system from Islamabad to the provinces and a patronage-based system below that. New provincial units with constitutional standing, their own smaller assemblies and their own NFC claims could lock rules-based transfers into the lower tier, rather than relying on the goodwill of whoever rules the province.
The disparity inside provinces is as large as the disparity between them. Southern Punjab, northern Sindh, south Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Hazara, and the Makran coast all show welfare indicators well below their provincial averages.
Aggregate provincial statistics hide this because the capitals pull the averages up. Smaller units can make outcomes transparent, and what is visible can be audited, benchmarked, and held to account.
Comparative international record is mixed. India's 2000 reorganisation created Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand.
The former two performed relatively better, but Jharkhand's record is poor. Telangana in 2014 is too recent for clean conclusions.
Indonesia's pemekaran, the proliferation of new regions after 2000, created many new units without viability criteria. Costs rose and gains in service delivery were modest and uneven.
The lesson is not that new units fail. It is that outcomes depend on whether the laws and regulations that create them incorporate viability thresholds, transparent fiscal design and improve the quality of the political process behind the split.
Where those were in place, gains followed. Where they were absent, there were immense costs without benefit and consequent public disillusionment.
Pakistan's constitutional machinery provides a higher-quality political process than conventionally assumed. Article 160 and the NFC process already provide a framework for resource distribution that can accommodate additional units.
Article 140A, which mandates local government, shows that the constitution already assumes a multi-tier system. Article 239(4) requires that any amendment altering a province's boundaries pass that province's assembly by a two-thirds majority, in addition to the two-thirds majorities in both houses of parliament.
Ultimately, any administrative restructuring must be driven by economic viability, administrative efficiency, and public welfare rather than short-term political expediency to ensure long-term stability and development across all regions of the country.