Every morning, Sindh’s economy pays a tax that does not appear in any budget. A factory pays for tanker water. A shopkeeper pays for a generator. A businessman pays through delayed deliveries and lost working hours. A worker pays with hours trapped in traffic. A family pays for bottled drinking water because it does not trust the tap. A farmer pays when a broken road prevents his crop from reaching the market on time. A parent pays when a government school fails to provide a proper education.
This is Sindh’s hidden tax, the cost of poor governance.
And after nearly 18 years of Pakistan Peoples Party governments in Sindh, it is reasonable to ask a simple question:
Why have so many of the province’s most basic problems remained unresolved for so long?
This is not an argument that every failure belongs to the provincial government. Karachi’s problems involve federal institutions, provincial departments, local governments, utilities, development authorities, cantonments and regulators. Nor is this an argument that nothing has been done.
It is an argument about outcomes. After almost two decades of political continuity, the people of Sindh have the right to ask what has changed in the quality of their daily lives and whether the enormous public resources spent over these years have produced the services citizens deserve.
A province with so much potential.
The troubling reality is that Sindh is not a province without resources. It is one of Pakistan’s economic engines. Sindh generates roughly 27 percent of Pakistan’s GDP, according to the World Bank. Agriculture remains central to its economy and livelihoods, while Karachi is the country’s principal commercial, financial and industrial center. Karachi has Pakistan’s largest port complex, major financial institutions, manufacturing industries, exporters, technology companies and a huge consumer market. Sindh has agriculture, fisheries, livestock, energy resources, a long coastline and enormous potential for trade and industry. Yet the province struggles to provide some of the most basic services. That mismatch should concern everyone.
Because poverty in a resource-rich province is not simply an economic problem. It is a governance problem.
Karachi which is the economic engine without an appropiate steering system
Karachi is too vital to be governed through institutional confusion.
The city is administered through a complicated collection of provincial departments, municipal institutions, development authorities, federal bodies, cantonments and utility companies. The result is familiar. When something works, several institutions claim credit. When something fails, responsibility becomes blurred!! The World Bank has described Karachi’s governance as highly fragmented and highlighted weak institutional capacity, poor coordination and inadequate planning as major obstacles to the city’s development. It estimated that around US$10 billion in capital investment would be needed to close critical infrastructure gaps. But there is a lesson here that we repeatedly ignores and that is Money alone cannot fix a governance problem.
You can build a road, but somebody must maintain it. You can install a water pipeline, but somebody must operate the system. You can construct a sewage treatment plant, but somebody must keep it functioning. You can announce a transport project, but somebody must integrate it with housing, roads and future population growth. Infrastructure requires institutions.
Water: when a basic necessity becomes a business
Imagine running a factory in which water is not reliably available.
The owner has two choices either stop production or buy water. The same applies to hotels, restaurants, hospitals, schools, offices and households. The World Bank has found that Karachi’s water and sewage networks have historically met only around half of the city’s needs. Water availability is limited, while private tankers have become an essential part of the city’s informal water economy. This is not merely inconvenient. It is expensive. And the poor pay disproportionately more.
The World Bank’s 2024 Karachi Water and Sewerage Services Improvement Project, worth US$240 million, explicitly identifies the high cost of alternative water sources, the time spent collecting water and the health consequences of inadequate WASH services as problems requiring intervention. The project aims to provide safely managed water to nearly 16 million people and sanitation services to about 7.5 million by 2030.
The fact that such huge international financing is still required to address basic water and sanitation needs should make us pause. After all these years, why are these still emergency level problems?
When water becomes a health issue
The connection between governance and health becomes painfully obvious when we talk about drinking water. WHO has documented the consequences directly. During a cholera outbreak investigation in Karachi in 2022, WHO reported that of 71 tested water samples for which results were available, 70 percent contained Vibrio cholerae, while E. coli and coliform contamination were found in 55 percent and 90 percent, respectively. These are not just abstract numbers. Behind every contaminated water sample is a family. A sick child. A mother taking time away from work. A father paying a hospital bill. A household buying medicines instead of food or school supplies.
The World Bank has also linked poor water and sanitation conditions to severe human-capital problems in Sindh. In some of the province’s poorest districts, more than 60 percent of children under five suffer from stunting. A child cannot develop properly on contaminated water!!. And no economy can develop properly while its children are being denied the foundations of healthy growth.
Sewage: the problem we have normalised
Perhaps nothing illustrates the failure of urban management more clearly than sewage flowing through residential neighbourhoods.
Karachi’s sewerage infrastructure has struggled for decades. The World Bank has described a city where most sewage historically went untreated into the sea and where water, sewerage and solid-waste Systems failed to keep pace with population growth. We have somehow become accustomed to it. A drain overflowing after rain is no longer shocking. A street covered in sewage is no longer shocking. Garbage accumulating on roadsides is no longer shocking. That is perhaps the most dangerous development of all. We have lowered our expectations of government.
The business community pays first.
Bad governance is often discussed as though it only affects ordinary citizens. Businesses pay heavily for it. A manufacturer has to deal with unreliable utilities. A retailer loses customers when roads become inaccessible. An exporter faces additional logistics costs when traffic delays trucks. A restaurant has to maintain water storage and backup systems.
A technology company competes for skilled workers who may themselves be struggling with poor transport and unreliable urban services. A foreign investor looks at all these things before committing capital. Businesses can survive competition. They can survive taxes. They can survive difficult markets. What they struggle to survive is uncertainty. A serious investor wants to know; Can I get electricity? Can I get gas? Can I get water? Can my employees reach the workplace? Can my goods reach the port in time? Will the rules remain stable? Will the infrastructure around my investment function?
These are governance questions!! And therefore, governance is an investment policy!
Rural Sindh has a different face of the same crisis.
It has enormous agricultural potential, yet millions remain trapped in poverty.
Again I will give the reference of World Bank, It estimates that around 37 percent of Sindh’s rural population lives below the poverty line. In some flood-affected districts, poverty has reached much higher levels. These areas also face inadequate access to healthcare, water, sanitation, education and electricity.
Agriculture employs a huge proportion of Sindh’s population, but the province continues to struggle with inefficient irrigation, weak rural infrastructure and limited value addition. This is where Sindh needs a different economic vision. Why should a farmer remain poor simply because he produces cotton, rice, wheat, vegetables, livestock or fish? The real opportunity is everything that comes afterwards, processing, packaging, cold storage, logistics, exports and agro-industry. A rural farmer should not merely produce a crop. He should be connected to an entire value chain. That requires roads, electricity, irrigation, storage, markets and predictable government services. Again, it comes back to governance!
The floods exposed what we already knew.
The floods of 2022, exposed what years of weak infrastructure had left vulnerable.
But they also exposed deep weaknesses created by inadequate planning, poor infrastructure and institutional failure.
More than 4.4 million acres of agricultural land in Sindh were damaged, while infrastructure suffered enormous losses. The World Bank estimated the province’s post-flood recovery and reconstruction needs at approximately US$7.9 billion. Climate change means such events cannot be treated as once in a generation surprises anymore.
Sindh needs resilient drainage. Stronger irrigation systems. Better flood protection. Climate-resistant agriculture. Reliable rural roads. Planned settlements. Early-warning systems. Disaster preparedness. The question is no longer whether another major flood will come. The question is whether Sindh will be better prepared when it does.
Education: the crisis that will decide Sindh’s future
A broken road can be repaired but a lost generation cannot. Sindh’s education crisis may ultimately be its most expensive failure.
The World Bank has previously identified weak governance and accountability as major problems in Sindh’s public education system. More recently, the Bank has described Pakistan’s wider human-capital crisis as an huge economic constraint, with rural Sindh among the worst-performing areas for learning. The consequences are visible in the labour market. Businesses complain about the shortage of skilled workers. Young people complain about the shortage of decent jobs. But these are not separate problems. They are connected. An economy cannot produce a skilled workforce from an education system that does not reliably educate its children.
The province needs to stop measuring educational success primarily by buildings constructed and budgets allocated. The real questions are; Is the teacher present? Can the child read, write an understand mathematics? Does the school have drinking water and sanitation? Does the student acquire a skill that can eventually earn a livelihood? That is the real education test.
Health: spending is not the same as healthcare.
The same principle applies to hospitals. A health budget is an input. A functioning hospital is an output. A healthy mother and child are the outcome! The World Bank has pointed to serious human-capital disparities in Sindh, including high maternal and child-health risks and severe stunting in poorer districts.
A rural health centre without doctors, medicines, equipment and functioning management is not meaningful healthcare.
Sindh needs to judge its health system by what happens to the patient and not simply by how much money was allocated.
Electricity, gas and the cost of uncertainty.
Energy is another part of the same story. Factories cannot run efficiently without reliable electricity and gas. Cold-storage facilities cannot protect agricultural produce without dependable power. Hospitals cannot function without electricity. Small businesses cannot absorb endless interruptions. And when the cost of energy rises, the cost of every product rises with it. Not every energy problem is the responsibility of the Sindh government. The federal government, regulators and utilities have major roles. But that is precisely why Sindh needs a well-planned industrial and energy strategy that brings all these institutions to the same table.
Investors should not have to understand Pakistan’s institutional maze before deciding whether to build a factory.
Government should make that network.
The real question is where did devolution go?
Here lies the heart of the matter. Pakistan’s 18th Constitutional Amendment was supposed to strengthen provincial autonomy. But autonomy at the provincial level was never meant to mean that local government becomes an afterthought. A province of more than 50 million people cannot efficiently administer every neighbourhood, street, drain, school, park and municipal service from the provincial capital. The World Bank’s 2026 report on fiscal federalism makes the point particularly clearly, although major responsibilities and revenues were devolved to provinces, the share of total government spending undertaken by local governments has fallen from around 10 percent in 2005 to under 5 percent in 2024. The Bank argues that the structure of fiscal federalism has important consequences for whether citizens actually receive functioning schools and health facilities. This should force a serious national conversation. If power is devolved from Islamabad to the provinces but stops there, have we really achieved meaningful devolution? Perhaps not. A citizen does not need a provincial government to visit his street every morning. He needs a competent local government that can fix the street.
Sindh needs empowered local government
This is where the debate should move beyond personalities.
We need local governments that have, clearly defined constitutional and legal responsibilities; predictable financial transfers; their own professional municipal administrations; authority over water, sanitation, waste, local roads and other municipal functions; transparent budgets; measurable performance indicators; and, most importantly, accountability to citizens.
PILDAT has consistently highlighted the importance of effective local government and meaningful devolution as part of democratic governance. The principle is straightforward; The person responsible for fixing a street should be close enough to see the street.
And perhaps we need to rethink the map itself
There is another conversation Pakistan has avoided for too long. Can provinces and administrative units that have grown enormously in population still be governed effectively from one centre? This question should not automatically be treated as an ethnic or political confrontation. It can be an administrative question. If smaller administrative units can deliver better education, healthcare, infrastructure and economic planning, then why should the idea of new administrative units be taboo? And where there is constitutional, democratic and political consensus, Pakistan should also be willing to discuss the possibility of new provinces. The objective should not be to divide people. The objective should be to bring government closer to people.
Stop making Karachi taller without making it bigger!!
There is one more issue that deserves urgent attention. Karachi is growing vertically. Apartment towers are rising. Commercial buildings are multiplying. Population density is increasing. But infrastructure does not automatically grow simply because buildings do.
If we keep adding thousands of people to already congested areas without simultaneously expanding water supply, sewage capacity, drainage, roads, public transport, schools, hospitals and open spaces, we are not solving Karachi’s housing problem.
We are transferring it into tomorrow’s infrastructure crisis! Vertical development has a role. But it must be accompanied by planned horizontal expansion. Sindh should develop new urban centres, satellite cities and economic corridors linked by modern transport. Hyderabad, Sukkur, Larkana and emerging urban areas should be developed according to their economic strengths. Karachi should not be expected to absorb every new job, every new migrant, every new industrial unit and every new housing demand. A modern Sindh should have multiple economic centres rather than one overloaded megacity.
The way forward
is Sindh does not need another slogan. It needs a governance compact.
1. Empower local government.
Give local institutions genuine administrative and financial authority.
2. Second measure government by outcomes. Every district should publish a simple annual scorecard covering schools, teachers, hospitals, doctors, water, sewage, waste, roads, investment and employment. 3. Make cities economic engines.
Urban planning should connect housing, transport, utilities, industry and jobs rather than treating them as separate projects.
4. Make rural Sindh productive, not merely dependent. Invest in irrigation efficiency, agricultural value chains, cold storage, livestock, fisheries, rural roads, energy and agro-processing. 5. Rethink administrative structures. If existing structures are too large to govern effectively, Pakistan should have a mature constitutional debate about smaller administrative units and, where there is democratic consensus, new provinces. 6. Stop measuring success by announcements. The real measure of a government is what works after the inauguration ceremony is over. Sindh does not need saving. It needs governing. Sindh has the ingredients of a prosperous province. It has Karachi!! It has ports, agriculture, energy, a coastline, industry, a huge domestic market and millions of young people.
What it lacks is not potential. It lacks a governance system capable of turning potential into prosperity.
After 18 years, the conversation should no longer be about who is responsible for yesterday.
It should be about who will be accountable for tomorrow.
The people of Sindh do not need another promise of a mega-project. They need clean water when they turn on the tap. They need a sewer that works, a road that survives the monsoon, a school where the teacher is present, a hospital where the doctor is available. They need electricity and gas that businesses can depend upon, a local government that knows their neighbourhood and businesses need something equally important that is certainty! Because a business can survive competition and can survive difficult markets. It can even survive high taxes if the rules are predictable. But it cannot easily survive uncertainty.
And Sindh cannot build a prosperous future on uncertainty!
The province has waited long enough. The next chapter of Sindh’s politics should not be about who controls power. It should be about how that power is delivered, to the street, the school, the hospital, the factory, the farm and ultimately to the citizen. That is the real test of the next decade!! And after 18 years, Sindh deserves nothing less. Pakistan Zindabad
