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Muzaffargarh

Floodplain district · two rivers · three tehsils left on the file

Write this district as a water year, not as a slogan. The Chenab holds one shoulder. The Indus holds the other. In a quiet year the canals look obedient. In a loud year the same fields become a lake. That is Muzaffargarh after the map-makers cut Kot Addu away into its own district.

The 2023 count is 3,528,567 people in 552,926 households on about 4,778 km². Urban only 663,000. Literacy 43.74 percent — 51.38 among men, 35.74 among women. One resident in three is under ten. Saraiki is the kitchen language. The town takes the name Nawab Muzaffar Khan left it: the fort of Muzaffar.

What the new map kept

Muzaffargarh tehsil — 2,377 km², 1,905,995 people, reading rate 46.84 percent.

Jatoi — 1,010 km², 862,046 people, reading rate 40.67 percent. Town about 155,000.

Alipur — 1,391 km², 760,526 people, reading rate 39.15 percent. The southern wet end. Sitpur sits this way.

Kot Addu and Chowk Sarwar Shaheed keep their own commissioner now.

Wheat, cotton, the orchard that floods

Wheat first, then cotton, cane, mango on better loam, buffalo on the rest. The Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Hospital sits on the public health list beside the ordinary DHQ and THQ row.

The houses that keep getting elected

Ghulam Mustafa Khar, born 1937 at Sanawan, was governor and chief minister of Punjab in the Bhutto years. His niece Hina Rabbani Khar was foreign minister — the first woman in that chair. Ghulam Noor Rabbani and Raza Rabbani Khar keep the surname on later rolls. Jatoi is a tehsil and a house: Abdul Qayyum Khan Jatoi, the Dasti names, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, Jamshed Dasti. Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani governed West Pakistan from an earlier generation.

The voice that left the katchi

Pathanay Khan took a Saraiki kaafi out of this belt onto Radio Pakistan. Tauqeer Nasir took the later screen. Wrestler Azhar Hussain took a medal line.

How a flood year reads

2010 taught the newsroom the name. Later high-water years taught it again. Then the same field is sown. DG Khan is west. Multan is east. This strip is the argument both cities drive through.

Census 2023. Tehsil rows after the Kot Addu cut. Names from the public assembly and music record.