THE PTI government as a part of its manifesto has committed to creating a separate province in south Punjab. The demand for more provinces by certain political quarters gained traction after the adoption of the 18th Amendment.

Our existing development model has indeed been alarmingly skewed as it favours the already developed and advanced areas. The investment portfolio of the last 10 to 15 years substantiates this point. There is, therefore, a strong urge for even and balanced development in order to ensure effective delivery of public services and equitable representation in government jobs to aspirants from relatively deprived areas. The demand for new provinces should be seen against this backdrop.

However, the framers of the Constitution made the creation of new provinces cumbersome, requiring a broad consensus on the minutest of details by all political parties. That, at the moment, appears nowhere in sight. Moreover, any bifurcation of Punjab may well trigger territorial splits in other provinces on ethnic and linguistic bases. Therefore, there is a need to proceed with caution and in stages.

There can be key development units within a province.

With the passage of the NFC Award and the 18th Amendment, progress has been made regarding fiscal transfers to the provinces and below to the districts. There is, however, no cast-iron guarantee that the transfers made are fully utilised during the course of the year. The financial instrument of re-appropriation is commonly used to withdraw the amounts allocated to schemes in outlying areas. These are then often transferred to schemes located in other sectoral and spatial destinations.

Likewise, development funds that should be directed towards schemes and projects in distinct areas are placed under the head of block allocations. This amount often ends up being spent at the discretion of the province’s chief executive. Excessive use and abuse of these two instruments is against the principle of financial prudence and reflects distorted priorities. At the close of the year, these aberrations are given cover through revised budgets.

In addition, there is also the issue of equitable representation in the provincial services, with the outlying regions not getting enough representation when competing with candidates from relatively developed areas.

What we really need to go for is what I would call a regional empowerment order, which would lump together two or more civil divisions and any number of districts into a region through legislative cover. The region, according to the proposed law, may serve as a key development unit within the province, and fiscal transfers once made at the start of the year must under no circumstances be re-appropriated out of that region. At best these allocations should only be re-appropriated within the region.

Likewise, lumpy provincial service cadres should be converted into regional cadres. Selections to positions in BPS-16 and above should be made on the basis of merit within the region through the provincial public service commission. Vacancies in the region would automatically be filled by selectees domiciled in a district of the same region.

Career progression till BPS-19 should be in the same region; once an officer is promoted to BPS-20, he/she should then become part of the provincial cadre. The education and health departments, with their large workforces, could be the starting points for these measures. With time, more services can be turned into regional cadres. This measure could help assuage grievances of deprived regions.

Mega cities like Karachi and Lahore req­uire special dispensation. Provincial governments must get out of the municipal mode. Water and san­itation, building control, traffic engineering, parks and horticulture, and areas like waste ma­n­agement should either be placed with the metropolitan corporations or the mayor should be heading the boards of these entities.

Considering that these boards are located in the provincial capitals, representatives of the provincial government could also be appointed to the boards. This will bring municipal practices in line with the spirit of devolved participative structures as envisaged in local government legislation.

To ensure sustainability, it is time to broaden the resource base available to these bodies. Proceeds from GST on services (in the vicinity of Rs100 billion in Sindh and Punjab, with the bulk of the amount collected from the provincial capitals) should be transferred to them, and treated not as budgetary support but as tied grants.

A beginning has to be made with a sense of urgency and clarity, with the municipal corporations using these flows to devise and implement plans to resolve the perennial problems of providing clean drinking water, ensuring clean neighbourhoods, and other myriad issues faced by the country’s two largest cities.

The writer is a public policy analyst and adjunct faculty at Lums and a former federal interior secretary.

Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2018