LAHORE: The Punjab Bar Council has added its voice to demands for the creation of new provinces in the country, describing the step as an important requirement of the times.
Speaking exclusively to The Lahore Times, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Punjab Bar Council, Chaudhry Arshad Ali Hanjra, said further smaller provinces should be created in Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Chaudhry Arshad Ali Hanjra said the decision to establish new provinces in the country should be taken through the people and their elected representatives. Political parties, he said, will have to rise above their personal and political interests and make progress on the question of creating new provinces.
He said the establishment of new provinces in Balochistan is also a need of the hour, and could help improve administrative affairs and accelerate the country’s process of development.
The Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Punjab Bar Council announced full support for the Pakistan Bar Council’s resolution on the creation of new provinces, saying the matter of establishing new provinces on administrative grounds should be pursued seriously.
The demand is easy to state and constitutionally demanding to execute, and readers should understand what would actually be required.
Altering the boundaries of a province is governed by Article 239(4) of the Constitution. A bill to amend the Constitution that would have the effect of changing the limits of a province cannot be presented to the President for assent unless it has first been passed by the provincial assembly of that province by a two-thirds majority. It must also clear both houses of Parliament by a two-thirds majority.
In practice this means the creation of a new province out of Punjab requires the Punjab Assembly itself to vote, by two-thirds, to reduce its own jurisdiction — a threshold no proposal has yet crossed. The 2012 attempt, which produced a National Assembly commission on a proposed Bahawalpur–South Punjab province and a Punjab Assembly resolution, foundered at exactly this point.
The administrative case is straightforward. Punjab’s population exceeds that of most countries; a single provincial government administering it means a citizen in Rajanpur or Bhakkar is served from a secretariat several hundred kilometres away. Proponents argue that smaller federating units improve service delivery, shorten lines of accountability and reduce the concentration of resources in a single capital.
The counter-arguments are equally serious. New provinces mean new secretariats, new assemblies, new high courts and new public service commissions, all funded from the same divisible pool — and the National Finance Commission award would have to be renegotiated, a process that has itself been deadlocked for years. There is also the political objection: that reorganisation on linguistic or ethnic lines, rather than purely administrative ones, could entrench rather than dissolve grievance.
A bar council’s endorsement carries weight of a particular kind. Bar bodies are among the few organised professional constituencies in Pakistan with a demonstrated capacity for sustained political mobilisation, and their institutional interest in the question is real — new provinces would mean new high court benches and new judicial infrastructure.
But endorsement is not a route to two-thirds majorities in three chambers. The Pakistan Bar Council resolution and the Punjab Bar Council’s support of it are contributions to a debate that has been live since the 1970s and has never once reached the floor with the numbers to pass. What would change that is not another resolution; it is a costed proposal, an NFC framework and a party willing to spend political capital on it in the Punjab Assembly.
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