This refers to a letter from Mr. Z. Israr (July 8) wherein he ridiculed Mohammed Ali Durrani's idea of dividing Pakistan into 16 provinces. I would like to inform him that according to the information available on the internet, Turkey has a smaller population than us but is divided into 81 provinces with each province having its own government. And yet, Turkey is a far more closely-knit a country than ours and is better off economically. I do not suppose new provinces would have meant 81 300 MPAs with the same number of Pajeros and Land Cruisers. Unfortunately, for us Pakistanis, leaving aside the founders, our leaders adopted a high life right from early days, with the real boost coming with Ayub Khan, who would have nothing less than a purpose-built capital with a President's House that covers an area larger than the White House. The trend continues to this day. The leaders of India, the country from which Pakistan has been carved out, appear to have much simpler living. No doubt there was economic progress in Ayub era but at a cost which we have been paying ever since and will continue paying I do not know for how long. One big problem with Pakistan is that it has been terribly off balance, with one province having much-larger population and, thus, a greater share in power than the other three provinces put together. This makes us virtually a one-province country. Ayub Khan had even made it a reality, by making West Pakistan One Unit. The biggest problem with such unbalanced structures is that even the genuine demands and protests of smaller provinces are suppressed, sometimes violently and over time, these turn into full-scale insurgencies. That is what we are experiencing in Balochistan today. Some years back, there was talk about Sindhu Desh also. With smaller provinces, these problems would get sorted out much earlier. -S.R.H. HASHMI, Karachi, via e-mail, July 8.