It has been just been a couple of short years that local self-governments were introduced in Pakistan. This had an immediate affect in replacing the powerful, centrally appointed Deputy Commissioners with locally affected Nazims. The significance of this initiative becomes clear when one considers that the Deputy Commissioner was not just the head of the executive branch, but also of the district judiciary and also occupied a pre-eminent position in the district social hierarchy. Furthermore, the institution of central authority over local affairs goes back not just 50 years, nor even to the British Raj, but all the way to the Mughal Empire. Thus, this initiative is bound to have major long term affects.

There are a couple of developments that have already taken place that seem indicative of the significance and nature of these long term affects. These are as follows:

Education: The public schooling system has essentially failed in Pakistan, resulting in low literacy rates. Widespread teacher absenteeism in public schools reduced these to “ghost schools”. To date the gap has been met by individual initiatives by Pakistanis either through charitable foundations like DIL, or through high quality private schools for those who can afford them. However, these efforts are nowhere close to meeting Pakistan’s educational needs, and Pakistan’s ratings in human development remain abysmally low.

An unexpected development has now taken place. It appears that public schools that are sponsored by local self-governments actually work. It is too early to say this conclusively, but there seems enough anecdotal evidence to point in this direction. And certainly, it would be logical to expect the local self-government to be more committed to its constituents than politicians sitting in provincial assemblies or in Islamabad.

A related, and equally unexpected development, has been growing tensions between the provincial vs. local governments. These seem tobe present in three out of four provinces (Panjab being the only exception). This appears in part to be the result of party differences at the two levels of government in each province. While it is not certain how these tensions will play out and whether the results will prove to be healthy or unhealthy, there is no doubt that these tensions have arisen as a result of the devolution of district powers to locally elected officials. In the past, the Deputy Commissioner was beholden only to the senior officials of the civil service, and the provincial politicians knew their place. No more. Nazims, while drawing power from the district population that elected them, nevertheless do not enjoy the same cosy relationship with Islamabad, and as such are more exposed to the whims of the provincial politicians.

How the above-mentioned tensions play out will no doubt have a major impact on the extent to which the hopes raised by the success of locally adminstered schools will be realized. And the extent to which these hopes are realized will determine the fate of the tens of millions of Pakistanis of the school age generation.

The central government can, of course play a major role in determining the outcome of these tensions. One simple but effective way would seem to be to provide district governments with funds directly from the central government based on some simple and objective criterion (e.g. district population). This would require a constitutional change which limits the powers of the provincial governments and would no doubt be strongly resisted (as redundant layers of bureaucracy are bound to do). But nevertheless, the stakes seem high enough for this to be considered.