Faisalabad Division · the district that is also a title
Toba Tek Singh District is one of the 41 districts of Punjab, with its headquarters at Toba Tek Singh. It has 4 tehsils: Gojra, Kamalia, Pirmahal and Toba Tek Singh. The 2023 census counted 2,524,044 people on 3,252 km², and 71.38% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gojra | Tehsil | 755,579 | 851 | 28.37% | 74.22% |
| Kamalia | Tehsil | 422,477 | 486 | 39.44% | 63.55% |
| Pirmahal | Tehsil | 496,636 | 774 | 11.97% | 68.39% |
| Toba Tek Singh | Tehsil | 849,352 | 1,141 | 14.49% | 74.45% |
Most districts are named for a river, a saint, or a governor. This one is named for a pond and a man who kept water on it. Tek Singh — Sikh, remembered as kind to travellers — sat by a toba. The canal colony that grew there kept both words. A century later an Urdu writer who never made this town his house used the name as the title of a Partition story so exact that school syllabi and foreign lists now file the place as literature first and agriculture second. This page will not retell that story. It will record that a real tehsil, then a real district, has to live under a title the world already thinks it understands.
The 2023 census counted 2,524,044 people in 393,896 households. Urban 563,525. Literacy 71.38 percent — 76.37 among men, 66.13 among women. Punjabi first. Four tehsils on the old Lyallpur sheet, cut away as their own district in 1982.
Toba Tek Singh tehsil — 849,352 people, literacy 74.45 percent. Headquarters, the name, the ordinary civic. Gojra — 755,579, 74.22 percent. Pir Mahal — 496,636, 68.39 percent, tehsil since 2013. Kamalia — 422,477, 63.55 percent, the older town on this bar, the weaker reader of the four.
This was canal-colony square of Lyallpur District — wheat, cane, the Lower Chenab logic that made Faisalabad rich. Kamalia is the name that predates the pond story in some gazette layers. Gojra grew as a mandi. The 1982 notification gave the tehsil a commissioner of its own. Pir Mahal waited until 2013 for the same dignity. Nothing in that file required a short story. The short story arrived anyway, in 1953, and stuck.
Visitors come for the title and are surprised by an ordinary Punjabi town: a railway, colleges, a DHQ, orange and wheat depending on the year. The asylum in Manto’s pages is not a tourist site here. The pond is not marked for selfies. That is correct. A district is allowed to be more boring than its metaphor. It is also allowed to be proud that a sentence written in Lahore still sends readers to a map pin in Faisalabad Division.
Local television already used the name as comedy — Boota from Toba Tek Singh — which is another way a place gets stuck in the mouth. Assembly houses rotate with the central-Punjab habit. This page will not invent film stars. The names that belong without argument are Tek Singh at the water, the 1982 gazette, and Saadat Hasan Manto as the man who borrowed the signboard. He died in Lahore. The signboard stayed.
Stand in Kamalia’s mandi and the district is 63 percent literate and tired. Stand in Gojra and it is 74 percent and a bus to Faisalabad. Stand under the district board that says Toba Tek Singh and it is a title you cannot take down. Three standings. One pond. Census 2023. District date 1982. Story date 1953. The water is older than both.
Toba Tek Singh District has 4 tehsils: Gojra, Kamalia, Pirmahal and Toba Tek Singh.
The 2023 census counted 2,524,044 people in Toba Tek Singh District, up from 2,190,602 in 2017 (annual growth 2.4%). 22.33% of the population lived in urban areas.
Toba Tek Singh District covers 3,252 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 776.15 people per km².
71.38% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 76.37%, female 66.13%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Punjabi (96.2% of the 2,524,044 people in the mother-tongue table), followed by Urdu (2.48%).
Toba Tek Singh District is in Punjab. Its headquarters is Toba Tek Singh.