What the numbers say
A private market-economy research body has put a steep price tag on redrawing Pakistan’s provincial map. Under the heaviest design it tested—turning every current administrative division into its own province—the ongoing yearly burden on public accounts could climb as high as about Rs730 billion.
The Policy Research Institute of Market Economy, widely known as PRIME, set out how federal and provincial money would stretch if more provincial capitals had to be staffed and funded. Its work is about fiscal arithmetic, not a political endorsement of any map.
Two boundary sketches
One sketch leaves Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan as they are and breaks Punjab into three: Bahawalpur, South Punjab, and what remains of Punjab. That step would take the country from four provinces to six. PRIME’s range for the added yearly outlay on that path is roughly Rs46.9 billion to Rs56.2 billion.
The second sketch treats each of the 30 divisions already on the books across the four provinces as a separate province. That yields thirty units in all and twenty-six newly formed provincial governments. For that layout, the institute’s net recurring yearly cost band runs from about Rs609.2 billion to about Rs730.3 billion.
PRIME said the thirty-unit layout is not offered as a desirable territorial plan. It is meant as a stress check on how costly a far more fragmented provincial system could become for the exchequer.
How the bill was assembled
The study tracks two money questions. First, how today’s provincial slice of the federal divisible pool—the shared tax pot allocated under the seventh National Finance Commission (NFC) Award, the main revenue-sharing formula between the centre and the provinces—would be carved among the proposed units. Second, how much standing spending each extra provincial government would need simply to operate.
District population and land-area figures from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics census of 2023 were used to build the hypothetical units. On the operating side, PRIME’s lean case puts the core yearly cost of running one new provincial government at about Rs22.4 billion; the published extract ends before a full upper figure is stated.
The authors did not try to settle whether more provinces would lift governance quality or day-to-day public services. If better service delivery is the real aim, they argue for investing in stronger local government rather than assuming that new provincial boundaries alone will fix delivery gaps.
Debate over new provinces has long mixed identity, access to the state, and fights over budgets. This analysis speaks only to the recurring fiscal load of two illustrative maps. It leaves open whether lawmakers would ever adopt either design, how transition costs would be paid, and what trade-offs would hit other spending lines.
Anyone weighing the politics of new provinces will still need separate evidence on courts, policing, schooling and health. On the money alone, PRIME’s message is blunt: even a limited Punjab carve-up is a multi-ten-billion-rupee yearly commitment, and a division-by-division map could rival a large share of what the federation already struggles to fund.
Aasan alfaaz mein
Ek soch-o-samajh wale idare ne kaha hai ke naye sube banane se mulk ka kharcha bohat barh sakta hai. Sirf Punjab ko teen hisson mein baantne par har saal arabon rupay ka izafi kharcha bataya gaya hai. Agar tamam divisions alag sube ban jayein to salana bill taqreeban 730 arab rupay tak ja sakta hai. Agar behtar khidmat chahiye hon to report ke mutabiq pehle local government ko mazboot karna zyada ahem hai.
