Lahore Division · south of Lahore · phone 049 · postcode 55050
Kasur District is one of the 41 districts of Punjab, with its headquarters at Kasur. It has 4 tehsils: Chunian, Kasur, Kot Radha Kishan and Pattoki. The 2023 census counted 4,084,286 people on 3,995 km², and 62.85% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chunian | Tehsil | 979,746 | 1,212 | 21.05% | 60.64% |
| Kasur | Tehsil | 1,603,658 | 1,493 | 44.11% | 63.63% |
| Kot Radha Kishan | Tehsil | 424,875 | 398 | 24.02% | 64.66% |
| Pattoki | Tehsil | 1,076,007 | 892 | 21.21% | 62.98% |
Kasur is the first large district after you leave Lahore toward the Sutlej. The city sits about fifty kilometres south of the provincial capital. The district itself is older as a place than as a file: it was cut out of Lahore on 1 July 1976. Before that date Kasur and Chunian were tehsils of Lahore District. The name is usually read from the Arabic qasr — palaces or forts — the memory of a Pathan colony that built small forts here in the Mughal century. What a student meets now is not a fort town. It is a crowded farm-and-workshop belt on the Indian border, famous for three ordinary things that became brand names: Kasuri methi, Kasuri fish, and the sweet called andarsay. And for one poet whose kafis still walk out of the city louder than any factory.
PBS 2023 tables give 4,084,286 people on 3,995 km². Density about 1,022 per km². Urban 1,243,882. Rural 2,840,404. Men 2,087,217, women 1,996,670. Under-tens about 1,146,988. Households about 645,000. Literacy at age ten and above is 62.85 percent — 67.97 percent for men and 57.44 percent for women. The female half of that sentence is the education fact. Official site: kasur.punjab.gov.pk.
Kasur tehsil — 1,493 km², 1,603,658 people, literacy about 63.63 percent. Headquarters. Kasur city municipal count about 510,875 in 2023. DHQ now often called Bulleh Shah Hospital. The shrine, the museum, the old railway junction and the road toward Ganda Singh Wala all sit in this tehsil.
Pattoki — 892 km², 1,076,007 people, literacy about 62.98 percent. Nursery and industrial town on the Multan Road. Phool Nagar (formerly Bhai Pheru) is the factory belt. Balloki headworks on the Ravi sit in this countryside.
Chunian — 1,212 km², 979,746 people, literacy about 60.64 percent. Sugar-mill country. Changa Manga, Pakistan’s best-known irrigated plantation forest, is in this tehsil. Abdullah Sugar Mill is the large mill name students will hear.
Kot Radha Kishan — 398 km², 424,875 people, literacy about 64.66 percent. Smallest tehsil by land, carved later from Kasur tehsil. Town on the railway toward Raiwind. Highest literacy row of the four.
Four National Assembly seats (NA-131 to NA-134) and nine Punjab Assembly seats. Ten municipal committees, 125 union councils, about 641 villages on the district administration sheet.
Syed Abdullah Shah Qadri — Bulleh Shah — was born in the late seventeenth century in the Uch–Bahawalpur belt and lived and died in Kasur in the eighteenth. The kafis attached to his name are the reason this district is known outside Punjab. He wrote in the Punjabi that village singers still use: short, spoken lines about the self, the murshid, and the waste of caste pride. The shrine in Kasur city is the civic centre of that memory. The urs in late August fills the lanes the way a harvest fair fills a mandi. Qawwals treat the kafis as a book you learn by ear. Schoolrooms print a few couplets and then go back to the syllabus. Both uses are true at once.
A page that only lists the shrine as a tourist spot misses the argument inside the poems. Bulleh Shah’s lines keep returning to the same quarrel: a learned man who cannot see, a family name that thinks it is a religion, a love that will not stay inside a biradari. Kasur still lives inside that quarrel. Female literacy at 57 percent is better than many south-Punjab rows and worse than Lahore. Girls in Chunian villages can hear a kafi on a loudspeaker and still lose the school year to a marriage. The poem does not cancel the tehsil table. The table does not cancel the poem. An atlas page can hold both.
Other shrine names sit around the same city: Baba Kamal Chishti, Baba Sadar Dewan, Atta Ullah Vato Kheshgi. They are the older Chishti and Pathan layer under the poet everyone quotes. The district government lists them. Visitors who come only for one photograph at Bulleh Shah’s courtyard will be shown the courtyard. The rest of the map is mills, nurseries and a border post.
Bulleh Shah is the name that travels. Noor Jehan, born Allah Rakhi Wasai in Kasur in 1926, is the film and playback name. The voice that carried half a century of Pakistani cinema started in this town before Lahore and Bombay took the rest of the story.
Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Barkat Ali Khan are the Kasur gharana of khayal and thumri. The family later became a chapter of Indian classical music. The town still claims the birth.
Malik Meraj Khalid was Speaker of the National Assembly twice and caretaker Prime Minister in 1996–97. Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri was Foreign Minister. Aseff Ahmad Ali (Aseff Ahmad Daula) also held that office. Sardar Muhammad Arif Nakai was Chief Minister of Punjab. Rana Muhammad Iqbal Khan was Speaker of the Punjab Assembly from 2008 to 2018. Moeenuddin Ahmad Qureshi, caretaker Prime Minister in 1993 after a World Bank career, is on the longer list some local sheets still print.
Mohammad Akram is the Test fast-bowler name. Tahir Aslam Gora is the writer-broadcaster who left for Canada. A district page that only advertises ministers and singers is not a full civic record. Kasur has also carried hard public cases about child safety and industrial waste. Those belong in the issues paragraph, not in a famous-sons list.
The district is a strip of the Bari Doab. The Ravi runs on the north-west. The Sutlej runs on the south-east, which is also the international border. The abandoned bed of the Beas cuts the district into two locally named halves, Hither and Uthar (Mithan Majh), with only a few metres of height between them. Flood plains on both rivers still take monsoon water. Balloki headworks and the Bambawali-Ravi-Bedian (BRB) canal are the irrigation facts that turned waste into cane and wheat. Changa Manga is not a wild jungle. It is a planted forest, laid out in the nineteenth century as a fuel reserve for the railway, now the picnic name every Lahore school trip already knows.
Ganda Singh Wala is the flag-ceremony border post toward India, smaller than Wagah, still a Sunday destination from Lahore. Kot Radha Kishan carries a Krishna–Radha place-name from before 1947. Baba Ram Thaman’s shrine near Khudian still holds a Vaisakhi gathering. Those are the pre-Partition layers. After 1947, Sikh and Hindu families left for East Punjab; Muslim families from the other side, including a large Mewati-speaking settlement, arrived. PBS 2023 still records Mewati as a first language for about 11.5 percent of the district — a number most Punjab pages do not have to print.
This is farm country first: wheat, cane, rice, fodder, buffalo, and the fenugreek that made Kasuri methi a kitchen word across Pakistan. Leather tanning and small industry sit on the Kasur–Lahore road. Pattoki’s nurseries sell plants to half the province. Phool Nagar and Chunian add mills. Fish stalls in the city are a local boast, not a census row. Many professional jobs still mean a bus to Lahore. That is the gravity the district cannot pretend is not there.
Punjabi about 3.44 million speakers — roughly 84 percent. Mewati about 471,000 (11.5 percent). Urdu about 137,000 (3.4 percent). Pashto, Sindhi and Saraiki are small rows. The folk belt is Punjabi. The Mewati figure is the Partition settlement still audible in the 2023 mother-tongue table.
Government colleges in Kasur, Pattoki, Chunian and Kot Radha Kishan. Most professional seats still mean Lahore: Punjab University, UET, medical colleges, UVAS. DHQ / Bulleh Shah Hospital in Kasur city is the public hospital. THQs cover the other three tehsils. Twelve rural health centres and about eighty-two BHUs on the district sheet. River and border villages lose hours when a bund road goes under or a crossing closes.
Kasur city, Pattoki, Chunian, Kot Radha Kishan, Phool Nagar, Khudian, Raja Jang, Kanganpur, Mustafabad, Ganda Singh Wala, Balloki, Changa Manga.
Sources: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023; Government of Punjab, District Kasur (kasur.punjab.gov.pk); published notes on Bulleh Shah, Noor Jehan and the Kasur gharana. Checked September 2026.
The 7th Population and Housing Census (2023) by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) counted 4,084,286 people in Kasur District — 2,087,217 males and 1,996,670 females (sex ratio 104.53 males per 100 females). The 2017 census had counted 3,454,881, so the district gained 629,405 people in six years (difference calculated from the two PBS totals), an average annual growth rate of 2.84%. The district covers 3,995 km², giving a density of 1022.35 people per km²; 30.46% of residents live in urban areas and the average household has 6.3 members.
| Tehsil / area | 2017 | 2023 | Annual growth % | Area km² | Density /km² | Sex ratio | Household size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chunian Tehsil | 826,323 | 979,746 | 2.89 | 1,212 | 808.37 | 103.94 | 6.1 |
| Kasur Tehsil | 1,333,583 | 1,603,658 | 3.13 | 1,493 | 1074.12 | 104.55 | 6.3 |
| Kot Radha Kishan Tehsil | 360,523 | 424,875 | 2.78 | 398 | 1067.53 | 105.88 | 6.9 |
| Pattoki Tehsil | 934,452 | 1,076,007 | 2.39 | 892 | 1206.29 | 104.52 | 6.2 |
PBS reports a literacy rate (age 10+) of 62.85% for Kasur District: 67.97% for males and 57.44% for females, 68.60% in urban areas against 60.27% in rural areas. Of 2,934,580 residents aged 10 and over, 1,844,344 were literate. The census also counted 274,362 children aged 5–16 who were out of school (140,530 boys and 133,792 girls).
| Tehsil / area | Literacy % | Male % | Female % | Urban % | Rural % | Out-of-school (5–16) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chunian Tehsil | 60.64 | 66.58 | 54.43 | 69.65 | 58.23 | 65,713 |
| Kasur Tehsil | 63.63 | 68.19 | 58.82 | 66.89 | 60.96 | 97,678 |
| Kot Radha Kishan Tehsil | 64.66 | 69.73 | 59.20 | 74.07 | 61.59 | 33,355 |
| Pattoki Tehsil | 62.98 | 68.19 | 57.44 | 70.47 | 60.91 | 77,616 |
PBS Table 2 lists 10 urban localities in the district (MC = municipal committee, TC = town committee):
Source: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Census 2023 — Table 1, Table 2, Table 12. Figures checked against the PBS tables on 2026-10-07.
Kasur District has 4 tehsils: Chunian, Kasur, Kot Radha Kishan and Pattoki.
The 2023 census counted 4,084,286 people in Kasur District, up from 3,454,881 in 2017 (annual growth 2.84%). 30.46% of the population lived in urban areas.
Kasur District covers 3,995 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 1,022.35 people per km².
The 2023 census lists 10 urban localities in Kasur District: Kasur (510,875, municipal committee), Phool Nagar (114,530, municipal committee), Pattoki (113,735, municipal committee), Kot Radha Kishan (102,057, municipal committee), Chunian (87,547, municipal committee), Mustafabad (81,550, municipal committee), Alahabad (80,097, municipal committee), Raja Jang (66,404, municipal committee), Khadian (48,519, municipal committee) and Kanganpur (38,568, municipal committee).
62.85% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 67.97%, female 57.44%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Punjabi (84.29% of the 4,081,568 people in the mother-tongue table), followed by Mewati (11.53%), Urdu (3.36%).
Kasur District is in Punjab. Its headquarters is Kasur.