Fact-check: Punjab has a new Gujrat division and four new districts

After Parvez Elahi was elected chief minister of Punjab in July, his government issued a raft of notifications to create new divisions and districts in the province.

The official notifications, some of which have made it online, have led to confusion about the exact numbers of divisions and districts as of now in Punjab.

Claim

On October 31, a social media user wrote on Twitter that five new districts have been created in Punjab, namely Murree, Talagang, Wazirabad, Kot Addu and Taunsa.

This he added had increased the total number of districts in the province to 41.

On November 24, another Twitter account asked how many districts were there in the province, 32 or 41 or 34.

Fact

There are, at the moment, 10 divisions and 40 districts in Punjab, as per the official notifications of the Punjab Board of Revenue.

On October 14, the coalition government of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) designated Gujrat as a new division in the province.

This has brought the total number of divisions in the province to 10, which are: Lahore, Gujranwala, Rawalpindi, Multan, Sahiwal, Bahawalpur, Sargodha, Faisalabad, Dera Ghazi Khan and now Gujrat.

Not only that, four districts — Wazirabad, Hafizabad, Gujrat and Mandi Bahauddin — have been added to the newly-established Gujrat division.

Moreover, the Board of Revenue has also notified Wazirabad, Murree, Kot Addu and Talagang as districts as well.

This has increased the total number of districts in the province to 40.

Punjab’s Land Revenue Act of 1967 allows the provincial government to divide the province into divisions for administrative convenience.

Each division is further divided into districts, which are then divided into subdivisions or tehsils.

Gujrat a new division: What does it mean?

Gujrat is the hometown of Chief Minister Parvez Elahi.

For the new Gujrat division, Elahi’s government has carved out districts from the Gujranwala division — therefore Hafizabad and Mandi Bahauddin  — and added them to the Gujrat division.

This has led to outrage amongst lawmakers from these districts, who complain that this decision will create problems for residents.

Shaukat Bhatti, a PTI MNA from Hafizabad, has been protesting against the inclusion of Hafizabad in the Gujrat division.

“It is unfair. Hafizabad and Gujrat don’t even share a boundary,” Bhatti said, in a video message posted online, “Gujranwala [division] is closer to us than Gujrat [division].”

Bilal Farooq Tarar, a member of the Punjab assembly (MPA) belonging to the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), agreed that the new division will create logistical issues for the residents of Hafizabad and Wazirabad, as they will now have to travel longer distances to reach Gujrat’s divisional headquarters for basic documents made.

Tarar sees this move by the chief minister as purely political and an attempt to divide rival PML-N’s electorate in Gujranwala.

“People say Lahore is the home turf of the PML-N,” Tarar told Geo Fact Check, “But it is actually Gujranwala which has always given the party better results. It [PML-Q] is trying to break up Gujranwala to break up the political influence of the PML-N in the area.”

While Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, the president of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development And Transparency (PILDAT), told Geo Fact Check that in general creating a new district or tehsil is more beneficial to the people of the area. A closer tehsil or district office means more convenience, he added.

But he explained that the creation of a new Gujrat division “may be politically beneficial for the current political leadership of Punjab, especially the chief minister and his family,” Mehboob said, “because they [Elahi] can project it as a great victory for the people of Gujrat.”

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