Gujranwala District

Gujranwala District: Quick Answers

Gujranwala District is one of the 41 districts of Punjab, in Gujranwala Division, with its headquarters at Gujranwala. The 2023 census lists 5 administrative units in it: Gujranwala City, Gujranwala Saddar, Kamoke, Nowshera Virkan and Wazirabad. The 2023 census counted 5,959,750 people (pre-split boundaries) on 3,622 km², and 76.77% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.

Population

5,959,750 (2023 census)

Area

3,622 km² · 1,645.43 people per km²

Urban population

60.3%

Annual growth 2017–2023

2.94%

Average household size

7

Population in 2017

5,011,066

Sex ratio

103.32 males per 100 females

Literacy rate (age 10+)

76.77% · male 78.14% · female 75.36%

Largest urban localities (2023)

Gujranwala 2,511,118 · Kamoke 292,023 · Gujranwala Cantonment 156,929 · Wazirabad 152,624 · Ludhewala Waraich 100,331

Main mother tongues

Punjabi 92.32% · Urdu 6.21%

Census units (2023)

Gujranwala City (tehsil), Gujranwala Saddar (tehsil), Kamoke (tehsil), Nowshera Virkan (tehsil), Wazirabad (tehsil)

Headquarters

Gujranwala

Division

Gujranwala Division

Province / territory

Punjab

Known for

Industrial city of Punjab’s north-east, known for electrical goods and food.

Culture

Punjabi business culture and wrestlers’ tradition.

Education

University of the Punjab Gujranwala campus and many colleges.

Healthcare

DHQ / teaching hospital Gujranwala.

Villages / local areas

Kamoke, Nowshera Virkan countryside

Gujranwala District: 2023 census figures by tehsil

Name	Type	Population	Area (km²)	Urban	Literacy (10+)
Gujranwala City	Tehsil	2,511,118	131	100%	79.39%
Gujranwala Saddar	Tehsil	1,133,101	783	31.96%	75.71%
Kamoke	Tehsil	681,339	834	42.86%	73.04%
Nowshera Virkan	Tehsil	640,780	678	9.31%	71.36%
Wazirabad	Tehsil	993,412	1,196	37.15%	77.39%

These figures are for Gujranwala District as enumerated in the 2023 census, before Wazirabad District was created from part of it, so the current district total is lower. Tehsils of Gujranwala District →

Source: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Census 2023, Table 1. Checked 2026-09-29.

Gujranwala does not introduce itself as a quiet canal town. It introduces itself at dinner. A family that has spent the day in a sanitary-fitting unit or a rice mill will still argue, with feeling, about whose paye is better and whether the karahi should be mutton or beef. That argument is not a side note. It is how the city talks about itself. The factories and the GT Road matter. The plate matters at least as much.

The district on the current map is smaller than the old one. Wazirabad has been notified as its own district. Residual Gujranwala, in the 2023 tables used with that border, holds about 4,966,338 people in 706,796 households on 2,426 km². Density is brutal for a Punjabi district — about 2,045 people per square kilometre. Urban share is high: about 3.22 million urban, 1.74 million rural. Literacy at age ten and above is 76.65 percent — 77.94 percent for men and 75.31 percent for women. The female row is close to the male row, which is not true of southern Punjab. City tehsil literacy is about 79.4 percent. Nowshera Virkan is about 71.4 percent.

Older combined sheets that still print near 5.96 million are counting Wazirabad inside Gujranwala. This page keeps the residual figure for the district that exists now, and says so. Postal code 52200. Official site: gujranwala.punjab.gov.pk. Maharaja Ranjit Singh was born here; wrestlers still train here; neither fact feeds a household on its own.

Four tehsils after Wazirabad left

Gujranwala City — 131 km², 2,511,118 people, literacy about 79.4 percent. Nineteen thousand people per square kilometre. This is the municipal corporation, the food streets, the DHQ / teaching side, the Punjab University campus belt, Khiali, Aroop, Nandipur and the old inner quarters.

Gujranwala Saddar — 783 km², 1,133,101 people, literacy about 75.7 percent. Qila Didar Singh, Ladhewala Warraich, the ring of chaks and the rice belt that is not quite the city.

Kamoke — 834 km², 681,339 people, literacy about 73.0 percent. Rice town. Basmati houses and a municipal corporation of its own. People from here drive into Gujranwala for a night meal and drive home talking about it.

Nowshera Virkan — 678 km², 640,780 people, literacy about 71.4 percent. West of the city. Rice villages, a municipal committee, and the quietest of the four tehsils until harvest.

Wazirabad — cutlery, Chenab crossing, the old fifth tehsil — is next door now. Readers using a 2011 investment booklet will still see it listed under Gujranwala. Treat that as the old map.

Gujranwala: Workshops, scrap and the rice sack

If Faisalabad spins cloth, Gujranwala bends metal and fires clay. Electrical fans, motors, pumps, switchgear, sanitary fittings, ceramics, melamine, rice mills, flour mills. The scrap mandi is one of the largest in the country: ships and wrecks come apart here and go back out as raw metal for the same workshops. Local accounts like to say the district punches above its land area in national manufacturing. The precise percentage changes with the year. The scrap yard and the fan factory do not.

Kamoke and Nowshera Virkan are rice country. Super Kernel basmati from this belt leaves for Karachi and for export. Wheat sits beside it. Guava and citrus on the better plots. Livestock — buffalo first — is not a museum fact. It is why the meat shops stay busy. A Punjab Food Authority count for the wider old district listed hundreds of beef and mutton shops alone, before you even count the karahi houses that never registered as a “meat shop.”

GT Road and the railway put the city between Lahore and Gujrat / Sialkot. That location is the business plan. It is also the traffic plan nobody finished. Smog and workshop smoke sit on the same winter mornings as Lahore’s, only with more foundry dust.

Gujranwala: A city that takes meat seriously

Gujranwala eats. Not as a slogan for tourists. As a daily habit that people will defend. Guru Nanakpura is the food street most outsiders are pointed to. Gobindgarh, Baghbanpura, Bakhtewala, Liberty — different pockets, same argument about whose tawa is cleaner and whose karahi has more bone. Rahwali, by the cantonment, is the kulfi name. The meat argument starts earlier than dessert.

Mutton is the prestige order. A family celebrating a job, a wrestler’s win, or a guest from Sialkot will default to mutton karahi, namkeen gosht, or tikka that still smells of charcoal. Mutton paye on a winter morning is not a restaurant gimmick here. It is what a lot of households consider a proper start if they can afford the kilo. Hareesa — the Amritsari-style pot of lentils, wheat and meat that Guru Nanakpura is famous for — is cooked in mutton when the house wants to show respect. Beef hareesa exists and sells. Mutton is the one people mention first when they are boasting.

Beef is the everyday backbone. It is cheaper, it feeds more plates, and Gujranwala does not treat it as a lesser meat the way some Lahore menus quietly do. Beef karahi, beef qeema, nihari on the bone, paye that use beef trotters because that is what the pot was built for — these are weekday foods. Siri paye, the gelatinous breakfast that the Food Authority gazette itself bothered to write down for this district, is as often beef as mutton. Chargha and fried bird get the posters. The long queues at dawn are still paye and hareesa.

People from Lahore, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Kamoke and Nowshera Virkan drive in for those pots. That is not folklore invented for a tourism board. The hareesa houses say it because the parking is the evidence. A wrestler’s diet in this city has always been heavy on meat and dairy. The akhara and the karahi house are not two cultures. They are the same street at different hours.

Charye and batair — the small birds — are a Gujranwala specialty people name in the same breath as paye. Tawa fish, fried fish, kebab, tikka, nan channay, halwa puri, tak-a-tak. The list is long because the streets are long. What is specific is the refusal to treat meat as a rare dish. In a lot of Pakistani towns mutton is a wedding meat. In Gujranwala it is also a Tuesday meat if the workshop had a good week. Beef fills the gap when it did not. That rhythm is the food culture. It sits on top of a buffalo herd and a slaughter line that the district has never been shy about.

Gujranwala: Punjabi almost all the way down

On the larger 2023 tongue table that still includes the old border, Punjabi is about 5.48 million speakers. Urdu a few hundred thousand. Pashto a small migrant row. Residual Gujranwala is the same speech, only a smaller sheet. This is Majhi / central Punjabi country. The menu is Punjabi. The workshop floor is Punjabi. Urdu is the office and the college.

Gujranwala: Campuses and the medical college

University of the Punjab’s Gujranwala campus sits on the bypass near Shalimar Town. Gujranwala Medical College, on Alipur Chattha Road, is the public MBBS college under UHS. GIFT University is the private campus the city actually uses. There are engineering and health campuses of larger Lahore universities, a virtual-university presence, and a thick layer of colleges. Schooling is denser than in southern Punjab. The remaining gap is Nowshera Virkan and the inner-city double-shift schools, not the absence of a university name on a billboard.

Hospitals in Gujranwala District

The DHQ / teaching hospital in the city is the public anchor. GMC’s attached wards take the student load. Tehsil hospitals and RHCs cover Kamoke, Nowshera Virkan and the Saddar towns. Private surgical houses follow the food streets and the GT Road. Serious cardiac and cancer cases still leak toward Lahore. A paye-shop burn or a foundry injury at night is a local hospital problem first.

Gujranwala: What sits on the civic list

Foundry smoke and chrome from the fitting units. GT Road jams. A water table that the rice crop and the city tap fight over. Workshop fires. Child labour in the smaller sheds, as in every dense Punjabi industrial district. None of that is fixed by a good karahi. The karahi is still what people will talk about when they have finished complaining.

Gujranwala: Names on this map

Gujranwala city, Guru Nanakpura, Gobindgarh, Khiali Shahpur, Aroop, Nandipur, Qila Didar Singh, Ladhewala Warraich, Kamoke, Nowshera Virkan, Rahwali. Wazirabad is the neighbour that used to be inside the same file.

Gujranwala is a workshop district that refuses to eat lightly. The residual census sheet is 4.97 million people on a small map. The scrap yard and the basmati sack pay a lot of those households. The plate at the end of the day — mutton when the order was good, beef when it has to feed everyone — is the part of the district that does not show up in an industry table and that everyone here will correct you about if you leave it out.

Sources: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023 residual district and tehsil tables; Government of Punjab, District Gujranwala profile; Punjab Food Authority District Food Gazetteer, Gujranwala (meat-shop and dish notes); local food reporting on Guru Nanakpura hareesa and paye. Checked September 2026.