The local government is a structure of public administration that is a pure democratic system. This system of government delivers basic services by local municipalities and local ward councillors who are the closest to communities and play an activist and developmental role. Such a system's implementation will be a blessing for the people of Pakistan as their basic issues can be determined easily by the local administration, at their doorsteps. The Supreme Court (SC) directed the provincial administrations to finalise legislation by August 15, 2013 for holding the local elections. The SC issued the order that, “It is our constitutional duty to make certain the provisions of the constitution are followed to facilitate the general public, participating in good governance.” Now all the provinces have accelerated their efforts for legislation.

If any provincial government fails to hold the local government elections, then it will be disobedience of Article 140-A of the constitution, which states that, “Each province shall, by law, establish a local government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to the elected representatives of the local governments.” Being a citizen of Pakistan, I firmly believe that the local government system is in the best interest of the people and it should not be delayed further.

The importance of local government institutions – especially representative institutions that are answerable to constituencies as small as districts and sub-district units such as union councils and “talukas” – cannot be underestimated for a developing country like Pakistan. Democratic representation at the national or provincial level does not imply that constituents of any district or National Assembly constituency have direct and ready access to their legislator or parliamentary representative, and have even less voice when it comes to targeted, pro-public legislation being sponsored or passed by any given legislator for any given constituency

Pakistan faces an acute governance problem not only because its system of governance is outdated, or because it has only two tiers of government instead of the complete three (national, sub-national/provincial, local), but also because it faces post-modern threats and problems while it remains equipped with pre-modern, 20 th century tools at its disposal to deal with such threats and problems. 

What many politicians and political leaders in Pakistan do not understand is that local government systems – whether uniform in a nationwide or province-wide sense, or unique to each district – are the very systems which extent the writ of the state,