THE debate over Islamabad’s reluctance to fully let go of devolved subjects has been running since 2010. But it has made little difference to the governments that have come and gone in the meantime. The Senate Standing Committee on Devolution has once again put its finger on the same wound. Fifteen years after the 18th Amendment redrew the administrative and political boundaries between Islamabad and the provinces, the centre continues to run ministries on devolved subjects. The Senate panel is right to call this a constitutional violation dressed up as administrative continuity. The 18th Amendment envisages nine federal ministries. The centre currently has 31. Education, health, food security, culture, climate change, housing and several other subjects that were handed to the provinces still have a federal budget line. The pattern is sustained across governments.

There are two consequences. The first is the erosion of provincial autonomy through a less visible route of parallel bureaucracies. When a federal ministry keeps functioning on a devolved subject, it does not simply duplicate provincial effort; it re-establishes a centre of decision-making that provinces were supposed to have inherited. Policy, funding priorities and technical standard-setting drift back towards Islamabad. The second consequence is fiscal, arguably more damaging in the current climate. The numbers are staggering. The committee noted that federal expenditure has climbed to roughly Rs19tr. It suggested that federal spending be capped at around Rs13tr. This is not an abstract austerity target but a rough estimate of what the federal government would actually need to spend if it confined itself to the ministries the Constitution assigns it. This is where the two problems meet. An oversized federal government does not simply waste money in isolation, it widens the very fiscal deficit that then gets passed back to the provinces to help close. Provinces are routinely asked to deliver cash surpluses, restrain their development spending, and contribute towards ‘critical’ federal debt-servicing targets under IMF-linked fiscal arrangements, even as the federal government keeps funding ministries that have no constitutional business existing. The provinces are, in effect, being asked to subsidise the centre’s refusal to devolve. This is tantamount to federal free-riding financed by the same provinces whose autonomy is undercut.

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2026