Overview

• Speaking at Islamabad seminars on Sept. 24–25, Mahmood called the four-province structure unworkable and proposed creating 33 provinces, with no official policy response reported.
• He cited grave social indicators: 25 million children out of school, about 70% of seventh graders unable to read a second-grade text, roughly 1% reaching university, and 44% of children stunted, with Pakistan ranked 109th on the Global Hunger Index.
• He criticized centralized control of services, noting Punjab manages roughly 50,000 schools from Lahore and spends about Rs4,400 per child per month, yet learning outcomes remain weak.
• He linked weak governance to corruption and institutional failure, pointing to murder trials taking 16–18 years and case backlogs that leave a single Supreme Court judge handling more than 3,000 cases.
• He contrasted Pakistan’s scale and four provinces with China, India, the US and Indonesia, and cited Andhra Pradesh–Telangana’s post-split income gains to argue that smaller units can improve economic performance.