Bahawalpur Division · code 068 · four tehsils on a long hot sheet
Rahim Yar Khan District is one of the 41 districts of Punjab, with its headquarters at Rahim Yar Khan. It has 4 tehsils: Khanpur, Liaquat Pur, Rahim Yar Khan and Sadiqabad. The 2023 census counted 5,564,703 people on 11,880 km², and 47.94% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Khanpur | Tehsil | 1,169,138 | 3,190 | 27.73% | 50.08% |
| Liaquat Pur | Tehsil | 1,235,264 | 3,262 | 8.31% | 38.35% |
| Rahim Yar Khan | Tehsil | 1,778,542 | 2,464 | 33.25% | 53.66% |
| Sadiqabad | Tehsil | 1,381,759 | 2,964 | 23.45% | 47.04% |
Rahim Yar Khan is the south-eastern end of Punjab’s canal map: Cholistan on one shoulder, Punjnad water on the other, a highway toward Sindh. Large enough to hold a fertilizer plant and a university and still fail a girls’ school in Liaquatpur.
The 2023 census counted 5,564,703 people in 826,942 households on 11,880 km². Urban 1.34 million. Literacy 47.94 percent — 55.14 among men, 40.15 among women. More adults cannot read than can. Under-tens: 1.68 million. Saraiki about 3.61 million. Sex ratio 108.6 men per 100 women.
Rahim Yar Khan tehsil — 1,778,542 people. Headquarters and campus.
Sadiqabad — 1,381,759 people, literacy 47.04 percent. Industry and the Sindh-facing road.
Khanpur — 1,169,138 people, literacy 50.08 percent.
Liaquatpur — 1,235,264 people, literacy 38.35 percent. One of the weakest tehsil rows in Punjab.
School. Four in ten women ten and older cannot read. Out-of-school children are not a footnote. A measles cluster in a village is what a weak clinic and a weak vaccine round look like when they meet.
Water and heat. Flood years (2010 and later) displace households toward bunds and model villages. Drought and heat take the other years. Relief surveys found poor families sliding further after the water left.
Land and ticket. Makhdoom houses — Ahmed Mehmood, Khusro Bakhtiar and kin — are how national politics finds this district. Acreage still decides a school and a block vote.
Work that injures. Sugar mills, fertilizer, ginning — and hundreds of brick kilns. Kiln work is heat, debt, and a child missing from Liaquatpur’s classroom.
Money. Human-development tables have long placed this district near the bottom of Punjab. Education deprivation does most of the damage in those indexes.
Edge. Cholistan, the Sindh border, Sadiqabad’s truck and smuggling sentence.
Khawaja Fareed University. Sheikh Zayed Medical College. Canal jobs, sugar, fertilizer. None of that cancels 38 percent in Liaquatpur.
Census 2023. Flood and poverty notes from published relief and HDI tables. Industry from local land-use counts.
Rahim Yar Khan District has 4 tehsils: Khanpur, Liaquat Pur, Rahim Yar Khan and Sadiqabad.
The 2023 census counted 5,564,703 people in Rahim Yar Khan District, up from 4,807,762 in 2017 (annual growth 2.47%). 24.12% of the population lived in urban areas.
Rahim Yar Khan District covers 11,880 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 468.41 people per km².
The 2023 census lists 10 urban localities in Rahim Yar Khan District: Rahim Yar Khan (519,261, municipal corporation), Sadiqabad (274,210, municipal corporation), Khanpur (247,170, municipal committee), Zahirpir (76,979, municipal committee), Liaquatpur (66,933, municipal committee), Trinda Sawai Khan (36,223, municipal committee), Kot Samaba (35,908, municipal committee), Khan Bela (35,739, town committee), Ahmadpur Lumma (27,029, town committee) and Sanjar Pur Nao (22,800, town committee).
47.94% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 55.14%, female 40.15%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Saraiki (64.92% of the 5,561,720 people in the mother-tongue table), followed by Punjabi (23.92%), Urdu (2.93%), Sindhi (2.54%).
Rahim Yar Khan District is in Punjab. Its headquarters is Rahim Yar Khan.
Naushehra. The town was founded in 1751 as Naushehra and got its present name in 1881. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)