Carved from Lower Kohistan in 2017 · two tehsils · 280,162 people in 2023 · all rural
Kolai-Palas is the Palas side of old Kohistan, made a district in 2017 by lifting the Palas sub-division out of Lower Kohistan. In May 2018 Battera / Kolai was cut as the second tehsil. It is not Dassu and it is not Pattan. It is the Indus-facing valleys whose mother tongue on the 2023 sheet is Kohistani — about 202,000 speakers — with a smaller Pashto row and a large “other language” remainder.
Households 33,983. Population 280,162. Literacy 18.80 percent — 24.24 percent for men, 13.14 percent for women. Under-tens about 103,000 (43 percent of the surveyed count). Urban column: zero. Site: kolaipallas.kp.gov.pk.
Battera / Kolai — 170 km², 142,660 people, about 839 per km², literacy about 15.9 percent. Smallest land, densest, lowest literacy of the two.
Palas — 1,240 km², 137,502 people, about 111 per km², literacy about 23.1 percent. Largest land.
Female literacy at 13 percent is the education fact. Girls’ schools that keep a teacher through winter are scarce. Custom still limits movement and speech for women in many houses. The 2013 Kohistan video case — honour killings reported from this belt and tried in the courts — is already in the national record. This page names that public case. It does not retell it as a story.
DHQ-level care is thin. Mansehra and Abbottabad remain the specialist towns. A maternity case on a blocked Palas road is the ordinary risk, not a rare headline.
Sources: PBS 2023; tehsil literacy rows; 2017 district and 2018 Kolai tehsil notifications. September 2026.