Gujrat Division · district since 1993 · Chenab rice plain · phone 0547
Hafizabad District is one of the 41 districts of Punjab, with its headquarters at Hafizabad. It has 2 tehsils: Hafizabad and Pindi Bhattian. The 2023 census counted 1,319,909 people on 2,367 km², and 65.77% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hafizabad | Tehsil | 761,156 | 1,189 | 45.06% | 70.89% |
| Pindi Bhattian | Tehsil | 558,753 | 1,178 | 28.88% | 58.7% |
Hafizabad is a young district on old paddy. Until 1993 it was a tehsil of Gujranwala. The split was administrative, not cultural. The speech is still the same Punjabi. The crop is still rice. What changed is the file: a deputy commissioner in Hafizabad town instead of a journey into Gujranwala for every district stamp. The town itself is named for Hafiz, a Mughal-era official remembered as the man who laid out the qasba. Students can look that up. The living fact is the mill and the mandi.
PBS 2023: 1,319,909 people in 197,206 households on 2,367 km². Density about 558 per km². Urban 504,380 (about 38 percent). Rural 815,529. Men 670,023, women 649,826. Under-tens: 331,008. Literacy at age ten and above is 65.77 percent — 70.70 percent for men, 60.65 percent for women. That is a clear step down from Gujrat next door, and a step up from the southern canal districts. Earlier marks: 832,980 in 1998, 1,156,954 in 2017. Official site: hafizabad.punjab.gov.pk.
Most Punjab pages on this atlas juggle four or six subdivisions. Hafizabad has two.
Hafizabad tehsil — about 761,156 people, literacy about 70.9 percent. Headquarters. Municipal population of the city itself about 318,621 in 2023. Vanike Tarar (town council about 24,000) sits in this tehsil, along with Rasulpur Tarar and Kolo Tarar — Tarar country on the Chenab side.
Pindi Bhattian — 1,178 km², 558,753 people, literacy about 58.7 percent. This is the weak school row. Pindi Bhattian municipal town about 66,511. Sukheke Mandi about 50,458. Jalalpur Bhattian about 44,421. The M-2 motorway interchange at Pindi Bhattian is the road fact that puts this tehsil on maps people in Lahore actually use.
Hafizabad’s public reputation is rice. Not a slogan — a mill line. Super Kernel and the other basmati grades leave here for Karachi and for export. Local write-ups like to rank the district among Pakistan’s top rice-exporting districts. Rankings move with the season. The dryer and the commission shop do not. Wheat and fodder sit beside the paddy. Buffalo are the household livestock. There is no fan cluster and no power-loom street to rival the crop. When the international rice price dips, the whole district feels it in the same week.
Qadirabad and the Chenab headworks sit on the edge of this plain. Canal water is the other half of the rice story. A dry year is a mill year with less to mill. Flood water on the Chenab is the other risk, quieter than D.G. Khan’s torrents but real on the low fields.
About 1.26 million Punjabi speakers on the 2023 sheet — well over ninety-five percent. Urdu about 42,000. Pashto under 8,000. Saraiki is a thin line. This is central-Punjab speech, the same belt as Gujranwala, without Gujranwala’s workshop density.
Government colleges sit in Hafizabad and Pindi Bhattian. There is no public university campus with the weight of UoG or UAF. Degree students use Gujranwala, Gujrat and Lahore. School quality in the Pindi Bhattian villages is the education fact that survives every college foundation stone. Female literacy at 61 percent is the long result of those village rooms.
DHQ Hafizabad is the public hospital. Pindi Bhattian has the tehsil hospital. RHCs and BHUs cover Sukheke, Jalalpur Bhattian and the Tarar villages. A new DHQ block has been on the provincial list for years; delay is a local political complaint, not a rumour invented here. Serious cases still move to Gujranwala or Lahore. In 2025 the medical superintendent of the existing DHQ was among officers suspended in a provincial medicines-and-cleanliness action. That is on the public record. It does not replace a working ward.
Rice price and mill credit. Pindi Bhattian’s literacy gap. Village schools that empty when harvest labour is needed. Canal tails that fail in a dry May. The temptation to treat the M-2 interchange as development while the BHU behind Sukheke still waits on a doctor. None of this is unique to one season. It is the file the 1993 district was created to manage, and still is.
Hafizabad city, Pindi Bhattian, Sukheke Mandi, Jalalpur Bhattian, Vanike Tarar, Rasulpur Tarar, Kaleke.
Sources: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023 district and tehsil tables; Government of Punjab, District Hafizabad; urban locality counts for Hafizabad MC, Pindi Bhattian, Sukheke and Jalalpur Bhattian. Checked September 2026.
Hafizabad District has 2 tehsils: Hafizabad and Pindi Bhattian.
The 2023 census counted 1,319,909 people in Hafizabad District, up from 1,156,954 in 2017 (annual growth 2.23%). 38.21% of the population lived in urban areas.
Hafizabad District covers 2,367 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 557.63 people per km².
The 2023 census lists 5 urban localities in Hafizabad District: Hafizabad (318,621, municipal committee), Pindi Bhattian (66,511, municipal committee), Sukheke (50,458, municipal committee), Jalalpur Bhattian (44,421, municipal committee) and Vanike Tarar (24,369, town committee).
65.77% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 70.7%, female 60.65%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Punjabi (95.74% of the 1,319,651 people in the mother-tongue table), followed by Urdu (3.16%).
Hafizabad District is in Punjab. Its headquarters is Hafizabad.