Headquarters Daggar · Six tehsils · About 27 union councils · 2023 census: 1,016,869 people, all counted as rural
Buner District is one of the 38 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with its headquarters at Daggar. It has 6 tehsils: Chagharzai, Daggar, Gadezai, Gagra, Khado Khel and Mandanr. The 2023 census counted 1,016,869 people on 1,865 km², and 43.75% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chagharzai | Tehsil | 125,949 | 218 | – | 38.27% |
| Daggar | Tehsil | 192,776 | 290 | – | 47.57% |
| Gadezai | Tehsil | 197,466 | 472 | – | 44.22% |
| Gagra | Tehsil | 179,087 | 217 | – | 46.22% |
| Khado Khel | Tehsil | 136,560 | 343 | – | 45.1% |
| Mandanr | Tehsil | 185,031 | 325 | – | 39.47% |
Buner sits in a bowl of hills between Swat to the north and the Mardan–Swabi plain to the south. If you come over Karakar from Swat, or up from Rustam and Ambela from Mardan, the first thing you notice is that almost nobody here lives in a “city” as the census defines one. The 2023 Pakistan Bureau of Statistics count for the whole district is 1,016,869, and the urban column is zero. That does not mean the place is empty. It means Daggar, Torwarsak, Totalai and the rest are still classified as large villages and small towns, not municipal corporations.
The district was carved out of Swat in 1991. Before that it was a tehsil. Area is 1,865 square kilometres. Phone code 0939. Daggar postcode is commonly listed as 19290. Official pages of the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa still use those numbers, so they are the ones this note follows.
Ask in a Hujra who the big places are and you will hear three names before any other. Census-linked compilations used on public pages in 2023 put them in this order:
Just behind those three, the same lists put Rega near 25,538 and mention Bajkata (Bajkatta) as a heavy union council. If a teacher in Daggar draws the map on a blackboard, those five names usually appear first. None of this replaces a fresh PBS village table. When the Bureau prints a new row, this page will be corrected.
Older books still say Buner has four tehsils. That was true for years: Daggar, Gagra, Khudu Khel (Totalai) and Mandanr (Chamla). The present district administration and the 2023 tehsil tables work with six:
Add those six and you are close to the district total. Small differences in published tables come from rounding and from the year a tehsil was notified.
A complete house-by-house list does not sit in one public PDF. Pakistan Almanac, citing local revenue papers, once wrote that Buner had 27 union councils and about 105 villages, with Daggar tehsil holding roughly 40 of those villages, Gagra 32, Mandanr 17 and Khudu Khel / Totalai 16. Since Chagharzai and Gadezai were strengthened as tehsils, some of those villages have been moved on paper from one heading to another. What follows is the list that keeps turning up in union-council maps, the KP district site, and the named-settlement record — not a claim that every banda and kally is here.
Daggar, Torwarsak, Elai / Ellai, Rega, Shalbandi (Shal Bandai), Gul Bandai, Malik Pur, Pandher, Gokand, Krappa (Krapa), Sarwayi / Sarwai, Nawagai, Kawga / Koga, Batara, Amazai, Chinglai, Palai, Baja / Bajkata, Ambela (the pass village toward Mardan), Sawawai / Sawarai, Pacha Kili, Norezai, Ghurghushto, Dagai.
Gagra, Dewana Baba (Diwana Baba), Sori Chagharzai, Chowga, Makhranai / Makhbranai, Kab Ghani, Nika Pani, Bunerwal, Garyala, Shamozai, Kingergali, Soray, Kalan Kangalai, Kandar Katai.
Gadezai, Gadaizi (same cluster, different spellings on old maps), Gabasni, Palo Dheri, Batai, Machi, Babozai, Kohi Bermol, Islampur, Ganichitra, Ghaligay.
Totalai, Khudu Khel villages around the lower bowl, Naranji on some boundary sheets, Abkhel, Mali Khel, Mada Khel, Bassi Khel, Hassan Khel, Norezai pockets that sit with this tehsil in one list and with Daggar in another.
Mandanr tehsil is Chamla valley: 325 km² and 185,031 people in the 2023 tehsil table. Local-government papers counted 17 village councils here (and zero town councils). That 17 is the number of councils, not the number of every kally on the hillside.
Names that already appear on Election Commission ward lists, union-council maps, school papers and open maps for this tehsil:
Councils / large villages: Mandanr, Chamla, Nawagai, Amazai, Makhranai (Makhbranai), Koga / Kowga / Kawga, Chinglai, Surwai (Sarwai), Norezai, Kangalai, Kandar Katay (Kandar Katai), Khanano Dheray, Barkalay.
Other named settlements in the same valley: Sura (Sura Kamal Zai), Agarai, Koza Nawagai, Bara Nawagai, Ambela / Ambela Kalay, Maina, Rashaka, Tenaulo Dherai, Malka, Mahabanr.
Map notes for Sura put Koza Nawagai to the east, Agarai to the west, Bara Nawagai to the north, and the Chinglai hills to the south. Education lists for this belt name GPS Maina Chamla and GPS Maina Kawga, which is why Maina and Kawga belong next to Mandanr.
A field study in Chamla spoke to people in twelve villages but did not publish those twelve as an official gazette. This page will not invent extra names to look complete. Add the kally you actually live in.
Other names that appear again and again on populated-place lists for Buner: Pir Baba (the shrine town), Barandu river villages, Koga, Pandir, Mali Khel, Nawagai. Spellings jump because Pashto is written into English by different clerks. Torwarsak and Tor Warsak are the same place. Elai and Ellai are the same place. Gadezai and Gadaizi usually are too.
If your village is missing, it is not an insult. Send the tehsil and the union council. Villages are added as readers report them.
Three rivers matter in ordinary talk: Barandu through the middle of the district, Chamla, and Budal. Wheat and maize are the staple fields. Tobacco and sugarcane show up where water is kinder. Livestock sits next to the plough. The KP district page still describes agriculture as the main living, with minerals in the hills becoming a louder business than they were twenty years ago. That matches what you hear on the Daggar–Totalai road: trucks, crushers, and arguments about who gets the lease.
Hills are not decoration. They cut mobile signal, they close schools when snow sits on Gadezai tracks, and they decide whether an ambulance from a Chamla village reaches the DHQ before dark. After the heavy flood years that hit this part of KP, Buner was on the provincial relief list like Swat and Shangla. A note on this site should not pretend the rivers are only scenery.
University of Buner is the degree-awarding name students now use. Before that campus existed, boys and girls who wanted a BA or a professional seat left for Mardan, Swat or Peshawar. Government degree colleges and a thick layer of high schools sit in the tehsil headquarters. The literacy figure from the 2023 tables is the one to quote: 43.75 percent overall, 60.61 percent for men, 27.40 percent for women. Those three numbers explain more about Buner than any slogan. Girls’ enrolment has risen in Daggar and Gagra more than in the farther union councils. That gap is the actual education story.
Serious cases still travel. DHQ Daggar is the first stop. Lady Reading in Peshawar and the Mardan medical complex take what the DHQ cannot hold. Anyone writing “health facilities of Buner” without that sentence is writing a brochure.
Pashto is the mother tongue of almost the whole district — the 2023 tongue table puts Pashto at 975,062 speakers, with a Hindko pocket of about 21,000 and small counts for other languages. Friday sermons, dispute sittings and school-gate talk are in Pashto. Urdu arrives in the classroom and the court.
Pir Baba’s shrine is the place outsiders have heard of even if they cannot find Daggar on a map. Urs days fill the road. That is religion and also a local economy: rooms, food stalls, transport.
History in Buner is told through passes. Karakar toward Swat. Ambela toward Mardan — the Ambela campaign of the 1860s is still a school-chapter word. The official district page also records the older story of Akbar’s column coming through Karakar, Torwarsak and Daggar and the fight in which Raja Birbal’s force was lost. Those are the stories people repeat. They do not need extra colour.
It will not invent a village to make the list look longer. It will not put a fake hospital count. It will not rank tribes. Union-council boundaries move when a tehsil is notified; a printed list from 2010 can be wrong in 2026. The honest way to finish a Buner article is to say: here are the six tehsils, here are the three largest named settlements, here are the villages that already sit on public maps, and here is the invitation to add the kally that only the people who live there can spell correctly.
Sources used for the figures: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023 district and tehsil tables; Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, District Buner portal; union-council sheets used in humanitarian mapping of the old NWFP; named-settlement lists in the public record. Where two sources disagree on a spelling, both spellings are kept.
Last checked against public tables: August 2026. Correct a village name through the contact page.
Buner District has 6 tehsils: Chagharzai, Daggar, Gadezai, Gagra, Khado Khel and Mandanr.
The 2023 census counted 1,016,869 people in Buner District, up from 895,460 in 2017 (annual growth 2.15%). 0% of the population lived in urban areas.
Buner District covers 1,865 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 545.24 people per km².
Entirely rural: the 2023 census counted no urban population in Buner District, so all 1,016,869 residents were enumerated in rural areas.
43.75% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 60.61%, female 27.4%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Pashto (95.91% of the 1,016,674 people in the mother-tongue table), followed by Hindko (2.07%).
Buner District is in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Its headquarters is Daggar.