Headquarters Tank · two tehsils · 470,293 people in 2023 · Jandola was Frontier Region Tank
Tank is the small district that sits between Dera Ismail Khan and the Waziristan hills. The town of Tank is the headquarters and almost the whole urban row. Jandola is the second tehsil — the old Frontier Region Tank, now inside this district. People from Wana and Makeen have used this town as the first settled stop for a century: winter quarters, a hospital, a bus, a ration line when the high country emptied.
Pashto is the speech of Jandola’s 2023 row (44,737 of 44,794). In Tank town you also hear Saraiki, because DI Khan is next door. Bhittani names are part of the local map. This is not Peshawar and it is not Wana. It is the gate.
Households 70,563. Population 470,293. Area about 2,900 km². Urban about 49,200 (10 percent). Rural about 421,000. Literacy 40.67 percent — 56.89 percent for men, 23.18 percent for women. Under-tens about 163,000 (35 percent). Sex ratio about 106 men per 100 women.
Tank tehsil — 1,679 km², 425,499 people, literacy about 41.4 percent. Headquarters and almost 90 percent of the district.
Jandola — 1,221 km², 44,794 people, literacy about 33.6 percent. Former FR. All rural in the compiled table. Thin settlement, long land.
When Rah-e-Nijat emptied South Waziristan in 2009, Tank took families the way Bannu later took North Waziristan. Schools and grounds became holding places. Shopkeepers remember those years as crowded and unpaid. Return to Wana and Makeen thinned the camps. Some households stayed. That host-town story is part of Tank’s modern file, not a side note.
The same road still carries patients and students toward DI Khan when Tank’s own wards are full.
Government colleges sit in Tank town. Degree seats in number still mean DI Khan. DHQ Tank is the first hospital. Jandola uses a thinner public facility. Female literacy at 23 percent is the education line. A girls’ high school that stays staffed in Jandola is the test of whether the old FR is a district in practice.
Sources: PBS 2023; tehsil literacy rows; Jandola tongue table; FR Tank merger into the district. September 2026.