A resident of Rajanpur wakes up to find her street still without a functioning water connection, three months after she first complained. She does not know whether to call her local councillor, if one even exists, her MPA in Lahore, the deputy commissioner, or the relevant provincial department.
Each institution points to another. This is not an isolated frustration. It is the daily experience of governance in Pakistan, where the distance between citizens and the people meant to serve them has grown so wide that responsibility itself seems to dissolve somewhere along the way.
Pakistan’s governance debate has long fixated on the federation and the provinces, particularly since the 18th Amendment shifted substantial authority from Islamabad to the provincial capitals.
That was a necessary and overdue correction. But it solved only half the problem. Power moved from one centre to four, and in most cases stopped there.
Provinces absorbed the authority that once sat with the federation without meaningfully passing it further down, to districts, tehsils and union councils, where the actual business of daily life, water, sanitation, schools, local roads, primary healthcare, is delivered or fails to be delivered.
The scale involved makes this failure almost inevitable. Punjab alone governs well over a hundred million people from a single provincial capital, a population larger than most countries in the world. Balochistan spans a vast and difficult terrain where a decision made in Quetta may have little relevance to a village six hundred kilometres away.
Sindh’s rural districts often feel like an afterthought to a bureaucracy oriented toward Karachi. When one administrative centre is expected to plan, budget and respond to problems across such varied and distant geography, something has to give. What gives, invariably, is responsiveness.
Local government was supposed to be the answer, the third tier that brings decision-making close enough to citizens that someone is actually reachable and accountable. Instead it has become the most neglected layer of Pakistan’s constitutional architecture.
Local body elections due since 2009 have repeatedly lapsed past court-ordered deadlines, with provinces slow to cooperate on the basic groundwork of delimitation and voter rolls. Even where elections eventually happen, elected councils are frequently starved of funds and authority, leaving mayors and chairmen as figureheads while real decisions remain with provincial secretariats.
Punjab’s local elections, delayed for years, are now tentatively planned for this winter. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is still working through the consultative process for polls in districts where local governments have already lapsed. Sindh’s local bodies exist but their powers are tightly held by the province. This is not decentralisation. It is centralisation wearing decentralisation’s name.
The practical consequence is that ordinary citizens have no clear address for their problems. A blocked drain, an understaffed school, a road without streetlights: these are hyperlocal issues that require hyperlocal knowledge and swift, local authority to fix.
Instead they travel upward through layers of bureaucracy far removed from the street in question, handled by officials with no direct stake in that neighbourhood and no direct accountability to the people living there. When something goes wrong, no single office can be pinned down as responsible, and no election lets citizens punish or reward those actually in charge of the outcome.
Smaller administrative units, whether through genuinely empowered local governments, more provinces, or restructured districts with real fiscal and administrative authority, would change this dynamic in concrete ways. Service delivery improves when the people making decisions about a water scheme or a school building actually live near it and understand its constraints.
Representation improves when constituencies are small enough that an elected official can plausibly know their voters rather than governing a population the size of a mid-sized nation. Accountability improves when there is one clear office to hold responsible, and one clear election through which citizens can express their verdict.
And development becomes more balanced, because resources and planning attention are no longer concentrated wherever the provincial capital happens to sit, leaving peripheral districts perpetually last in line.
None of this is without risk. Multiplying administrative units can fragment planning, strain limited fiscal resources, and create new opportunities for local elite capture if oversight is weak. These are real concerns and deserve honest debate rather than dismissal.
But they are arguments for designing decentralisation carefully, not for avoiding it altogether. The current system already suffers from elite capture, inefficiency and unaccountable power; centralisation has not protected Pakistan from any of the problems decentralisation is accused of risking.
The conversation Pakistan needs is not simply about which party controls which province. It is about whether governance itself is structured to reach the people it claims to serve.
Until administrative units shrink enough, and local governments gain real enough authority, for citizens to know exactly who is responsible when things go wrong, that question of the blocked drain, the missing teacher, the broken road, will keep circulating without an answer.
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