Dera Ghazi Khan Division · between Indus and Thal · phone 0606
Layyah District is one of the 41 districts of Punjab, with its headquarters at Layyah. It has 3 tehsils: Choubara, Karor Lal Esan and Layyah. The 2023 census counted 2,102,386 people on 6,289 km², and 61.83% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Choubara | Tehsil | 299,082 | 2,754 | 19.06% | 58.42% |
| Karor Lal Esan | Tehsil | 684,729 | 1,823 | 13.24% | 62.43% |
| Layyah | Tehsil | 1,118,575 | 1,712 | 21.34% | 62.34% |
Layyah is a rectangle of sand and river that keeps being asked which Punjab it belongs to. West is the Indus, and across the water Dera Ghazi Khan. East the sand runs toward Jhang. North is Bhakkar. South is Muzaffargarh, the parent file this district was cut from in July 1982. The name is not a saint and not a king. Local speech calls a wild fuelwood shrub layyan. The town took the plant. Official English still sometimes prints the older spelling Leiah. Both point at the same mandi.
The town itself is older than the district board. Around 1550 Kamal Khan Mirani — a Baloch of the house that also marks Dera Ghazi Khan — founded the settlement on this cis-Indus bank. Jaskani Baloch took it a couple of generations later and held the Thal edge into the late eighteenth century. Durrani governors sat here long enough for a grim footnote: in 1794 Humayun Shah, a claimant to Kabul, was seized near Leiah and blinded on Zaman Shah’s order. Sikhs used the town as a local centre. The British, after 1849, briefly made Layyah a district and even a commissioner seat, then demoted it to a tehsil of Dera Ismail Khan, then of Mianwali (1901), then of Muzaffargarh (1909). The 1982 upgrade only gave the old name its own deputy commissioner again. The sand had not moved.
PBS 2023: 2,102,386 people on about 6,289 km². Density 334 per km². Households 341,131. Urban only 386,282 (18 percent). Rural 1,716,104. Under-tens about 605,000. Literacy at ten and above: 61.83 percent (men 70.91, women 52.21). Official site: layyah.punjab.gov.pk.
A riverine west that the Indus still floods; a canal-Thal middle that grows wheat, cane and rice; a sandy Thal east that prefers gram.
Layyah tehsil — 1,712 km², 1,118,575 people, literacy 62.34 percent. Headquarters. City about 151,274. Chowk Azam about 87,000. Fatehpur about 52,000.
Karor Lal Esan — 1,823 km², 684,729 people, literacy 62.43 percent. Named for the saint Lal Esan. Town about 38,000.
Chaubara — 2,754 km², 299,082 people, literacy 58.42 percent. Largest tehsil by empty land, thinnest by people (109 per km²). Town about 57,000. Sand, gram, a long road.
Greater Thal Canal is the modern argument against the sand. Cane is thirsty; gram is not; households plant both.
Wheat and sugarcane take the big squares. Cotton, rice, millet, sesame, pulses. Citrus is the orchard name. Livestock is payroll. Industry is small: one sugar mill, ginning, oil and flour mills, rice huskers, brick kilns. Heat is the other crop. Flood years rewrite the western villages. Drought years rewrite Chaubara gram.
Saraiki about 1.41 million — two thirds of the district. Punjabi about 580,000. Urdu about 58,000. Pashto about 47,000. This is the fact that separates Layyah from Jhang next door and from Shahpuri Khushab.
Mehr Abdul Haq (1915–1995) — Saraiki philologist who treated the language as a language, not a dialect to tidy into Punjabi.
Lal Esan — the saint the second tehsil is named for. The shrine at Karor sets the town’s week.
Kamal Khan Mirani — founding name, 1550, Baloch.
Munir Malik (1934–2012) — bowled for Pakistan in the early 1960s.
Assembly lists print Mahar Ijaz Ahmad Achlana and other local houses. Bahauddin Zakariya belongs to Multan, not this page.
About 1,500 government schools, most primary. Colleges in Layyah, Karor and the larger towns. Medicine and engineering still mean Multan or DG Khan. DHQ Layyah; THQs at Karor and Chaubara. Chowk Azam can outgrow a headquarters in commercial noise. This is a Saraiki doab that learned to take canal water without becoming a mill town.
Layyah city, Chowk Azam, Fatehpur, Karor Lal Esan, Chaubara.
Layyah is a shrub name on a river-and-sand rectangle. The 2023 sheet is 2.10 million people, a women’s literacy row still near half, and a language majority the rest of Punjab sometimes forgets to count as a language. The canal will keep pushing acres. The Indus will keep taking some back. The useful question is whether the next girl in Chaubara gets as far as the college in Layyah city before the gram field needs her.
Sources: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023; Government of Punjab, District Layyah profile; gazette notes on Mirani founding and the 1982 district; notes on Greater Thal Canal and Mehr Abdul Haq. Checked September 2026.
Layyah District has 3 tehsils: Choubara, Karor Lal Esan and Layyah.
The 2023 census counted 2,102,386 people in Layyah District, up from 1,823,995 in 2017 (annual growth 2.4%). 18.37% of the population lived in urban areas.
Layyah District covers 6,289 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 334.3 people per km².
The 2023 census lists 5 urban localities in Layyah District: Layyah (151,274, municipal committee), Chowk Azam (87,376, municipal committee), Chaubara (57,002, municipal committee), Fateh Pur (52,255, municipal committee) and Karor Lal Esan (38,375, municipal committee).
61.83% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 70.91%, female 52.21%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Saraiki (66.89% of the 2,102,361 people in the mother-tongue table), followed by Punjabi (27.57%), Urdu (2.75%), Pashto (2.26%).
Layyah District is in Punjab. Its headquarters is Layyah.