Why small administrative units are the real solution to bad governance.
Talk to people across Sindh and you will feel something. Almost everyone agrees on this one thing, even if they don’t agree on anything else. They want new provinces. In Karachi, you will struggle to find anyone against it. In the rest of Sindh, most of the people are riding. Only a small group push back, and their favorite line is that it will “break” Sindh. I think that line doesn’t hold once you see it. No one is talking about wiping out the Sindhi language or culture. It’s about distribution of management, not identity.
So let’s talk about what the current setup has actually given us. Between 2001 and 2017, Sindh approved 133 development schemes worth more than 114 billion rupees. Fast forward to 2025, and the Public Accounts Committee is still meeting to ask the Department of Planning and Development why these projects still haven’t been completed. The Auditor General’s 2024 to 2025 report identified procurement irregularities, weak internal controls, sloppy record-keeping, and departments that could not even hand over their audit records when asked. Audit of PPHI Sindh reveals procurement of drugs worth crores of rupees. In one year only 62% of funds were spent on education, 52% on health and only 31% on the environment sector. In 2025, the PAC had to ask for details of the core expenditure on the Rs 120 billion district development program as the deputy commissioners in the room could not explain where the money went. It’s not me making things up. This is contained in Sindh’s own audit reports.
And that’s really the point. It’s not about identity; It’s about distance. There is a real gap between the Secretariat in Karachi and a village in Upper Sindh that is waiting for a water scheme that was promised years ago. There is a gap between a line item in the budget and the person who wants to take advantage of it but never does. Smaller units will mean that development money is planned around what an area actually needs, rather than a remote estimate. Schools, hospitals, water, drainage, garbage collection—it’s all easier to keep track of when the responsible office is nearby rather than hours away. People will not have to travel across the province just to get the land records fixed. New administrative centers also bring government offices, jobs, and investment to locations currently seen only around a city. And people have a more direct say in decisions that affect their district.
Here’s the 10% who oppose it. Few of them will tell you that the governance of Sindh is going well at the moment. What they are really worried about is losing authority, authority. Dividing the province spreads political power and that is why some in power do not want it. Less captive vote bank, less strong hold. But that is their problem, not a real argument against better governance. It should not be enough to ignore the real aspirations of the majority: hospitals that work, drains that are cleaned, taxes that go somewhere.
None of this needs to happen overnight. Pakistan has done this before. In 1901 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa itself was separated from Punjab. This can be done in stages, starting with regional court benches and secretariat offices, long before anything becomes a full province, with a referendum available if the people want a constitutional route. Sindh does not have to choose between being united and being well run. It can have both, once it stops confusing the shape of the map how well the place works.
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