Sargodha is two calendars stapled together. One is the kinnow calendar: blossom, pick, crate, the motorway sign that still calls this the citrus belt. The other is the airfield calendar: PAF Base Mushaf, Combat Commanders School, a city the 1965 war named among the three that took Nishan-e-Istiqlal. Between Chenab and Jhelum the old name was Shahpur. The headquarters town is younger — a Lower Jhelum Canal colony laid out in 1903, one of the planned grids Punjab actually finished.
The 2023 census counted 4,334,448 people in 684,321 households. Urban 1.61 million. Literacy 66.73 percent — 73.63 among men, 59.62 among women. Punjabi first for about 3.93 million. Phone 048. Seven tehsils.
Sargodha 1,800,455 — 71.82% literate. Bhalwal 387,262 — 79.31%, the strongest reader. Bhera 384,403 — 67.37%. Kot Momin 544,208 — 56.33%, the weakest. Sahiwal tehsil (this Sahiwal, not the district) 407,487 — 63.34%. Shahpur 424,746 — 61.85%. Sillanwali 385,887 — 63.07%.
Before the colony town, Shahpur was the district. Bhera is the older civic room on the Jhelum side — a river town with a memory that predates the kinnow crate. The 1903 headquarters was laid on a tank; local etymology still argues pond and Godha. Jatt clans of the bar — Noon, Ranjha, Cheema, Gondal, Tiwana, Piracha — took the squares when the Lower Jhelum Canal made pasture into orchard.
PAF Base Mushaf (once Base Sargodha) is Central Air Command. PAF College Sargodha, from 1953, has sent a long roll of air officers. In 1965 M. M. Alam flew from this field; the city’s wartime conduct put it on the Nishan-e-Istiqlal list with two other Punjab towns. This page records the base and the award. It does not move every pilot’s birth certificate to Saddar.
Malik Feroz Khan Noon of the Noon house was prime minister in the late 1950s — the clan still farms and sits. Piracha, Cheema and Ranjha tickets keep returning. Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi treated the city as a home address for a stretch of the century. Cricket: Mohammad Hafeez and Rana Naved-ul-Hasan are the names the stadium already sold. Do not paste Rashid Minhas or Hamid Gul here without a birth file; ancestral talk is not a gazette. The college old-boys list is a different, honest fame — Sargodhian air chiefs and a foreign secretary among them.
This district grows the country’s kinnow bulk. Iran and Afghanistan were the old crates; those markets broke and the grove kept producing. Value-addition plants exist. So do years when the fruit is cheap and the diesel is not. California of Pakistan is a billboard. The billboard is not false. It is incomplete without the price the grower actually got.
Census 2023. Colony date 1903. Base and 1965 notes from the published PAF and award record.