Okara is a farm ledger that grew a city. The name is local talk for the okaan, the tamarisk that marked the waste before the Lower Bari Doab Canal made squares of it. In 1982 the gazette cut Okara, Depalpur and Renala Khurd away from Sahiwal.
The 2023 census counted 3,515,490 people in 549,724 households on 4,377 km². Urban 1,187,504. Literacy 60.25 percent — 66.52 among men, 53.71 among women. Punjabi first. Phone 044.
Depalpur — 2,502 km², 1,592,201 people, literacy 55.29 percent. Haveli Lakha, Basirpur, Hujra Shah Muqeem.
Okara tehsil — 1,241 km², 1,393,746 people, literacy 63.34 percent. Headquarters and cantonment edge.
Renala Khurd — 634 km², 529,543 people, literacy 66.98 percent. Stud farm and the Mitchell’s orchard stretch.
Potato made Okara a national noun. Cane, wheat, maize, rice, citrus. Mitchell’s Fruit Farms at Renala. The stud at Renala: horses, then dairy, then the tenant file.
British remount and dairy farms passed to the Pakistan Army. In the 2000s tenants organised as Anjuman Mazarin against a shift from share of crop toward cash rent. The argument is part of how the district is known — next to the potato, not instead of it.
Rai Ahmad Khan Kharal led an uprising on the Neeli Bar. He was killed. The story is taught here as local pride.
Mian Manzoor Ahmad Wattoo, of the Depalpur side, was chief minister of Punjab in the 1990s. Hujra Shah Muqeem keeps a shrine calendar. The potato merchant is less photographed and more numerous.
Census 2023. Canal and farm notes from the Montgomery–Sahiwal gazette and the published tenant record.