Headquarters Pattan · two tehsils · 340,017 people in 2023 · urban column: zero
Lower Kohistan is the Pattan stretch of the Karakoram Highway, where the Indus is already a big river and the side valleys climb into Kohistani speech. It is not Dir and it is not Battagram. Until 2014 this land sat inside one Kohistan district. That year the province cut Upper and Lower Kohistan apart. Palas later walked out again as Kolai-Palas. What remains here is two tehsils: Pattan and Bankad (Ranulia / Bankand).
The 2023 tongue table is the giveaway. Kohistani: about 280,000. Pashto: about 17,000. Urdu: about 4,400. A page that files this district under “Pashto belt” has not opened the table.
Households 47,347. Population 340,017. All rural. Literacy 22.05 percent — 33.32 percent for men, 10.32 percent for women. Under-tens about 136,000, which is 45 percent of the surveyed population. That age line is steeper than Lower Dir. Site: lowerkohistan.kp.gov.pk.
The jump from 202,502 in 2017 to 340,017 in 2023 is large. Some of that is real growth. Some of it is tehsil lines moving (Bankad carved from Pattan in 2018). Do not write a single-cause story until PBS prints a note.
Bankad (Bankand Ranolia) — 331 km², 205,851 people, literacy about 20.1 percent. Larger count of the two in 2023. Densest.
Pattan — 311 km², 134,166 people, literacy about 24.6 percent. Headquarters and the KKH bazaar name. THQ Pattan is the hospital name on public lists.
Do not paste Palas village lists onto this page. Palas is Kolai-Palas now.
The highway is the employer and the ambulance route. When a slide closes the KKH, Pattan waits. Degree seats are few; students who leave go to Mansehra or Abbottabad if they can pay the bus. Female literacy at 10 percent is the whole education paragraph. A girls’ middle school that stays open in winter is the test of this district, not a tourism caption for the river.
Sources: PBS 2023; tehsil literacy rows; 2014 and 2018 Kohistan split notifications. September 2026.