Headquarters Dassu · 422,947 people in 2023 · all rural · Indus and the Dasu dam country
Upper Kohistan District is one of the 38 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with its headquarters at Dassu. The 2023 census lists 4 administrative units in it: Dassu, Harban Bhasha, Kandia and Seo. The 2023 census counted 422,947 people on 5,440 km², and 19.05% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dassu | Sub-division | 148,914 | 1,958 | – | 15.11% |
| Harban Bhasha | Tehsil | 49,244 | 1,298 | – | 25.49% |
| Kandia | Sub-division | 165,232 | 1,926 | – | 13.71% |
| Seo | Sub-division | 59,557 | 258 | – | 38.19% |
Upper Kohistan is the Dassu stretch of the Indus, above Lower Kohistan’s Pattan. It was cut from the old Kohistan district in 2014. Kandia is the other large valley. Seo and Harban Basha are the smaller printed tehsils. Kohistani speech is the mother tongue — Dassu tehsil’s 2023 row is about 133,000 Kohistani speakers and almost no Pashto. A page that files this district under the Pashto belt has not opened the table.
The Karakoram Highway and the Dasu hydropower works are the two outside facts the rest of Pakistan already knows. Villages live with both: trucks on the road, and the question of whose land the reservoir will take.
Households 63,712. Population 422,947. Urban column: zero. Literacy 19.05 percent — 27.46 percent for men, 10.28 percent for women. Under-tens about 159,000 (43 percent of the surveyed count). Sex ratio about 105 men per 100 women. Site: upperkohistan.kp.gov.pk.
Kandia — 1,926 km², 165,232 people, literacy about 13.7 percent. Largest count.
Dassu — 1,958 km², 148,914 people, literacy about 15.1 percent. Headquarters and dam name.
Seo — 258 km², 59,557 people, literacy about 38.2 percent. Highest literacy of the four printed rows.
Harban Basha — literacy about 25.5 percent on the tehsil table; a smaller count than Kandia and Dassu.
The human-rights file here is not a slogan. It is the census. One woman in ten is counted as literate. Girls’ schools close when a teacher will not stay the winter. Custom still decides a great deal of movement, marriage and speech for women. That is a rights problem, not a colourful custom paragraph. A girl who cannot read a clinic card is already behind before any court file opens.
Jirga and family honour talk still sit above the police desk in many valleys. When a case is kept inside the house, the woman has no paper. That is the pattern rights groups already describe for Kohistan country. This page will not invent a single named case. It will say the pattern is real, and that the state school and the lady health worker are the first answers that actually reach a house.
Dasu dam displacement is the other rights line. Land, graves and paths go under water or under a contractor’s road. Compensation arguments last years. Households that lose a field lose the only wage they had. Men leave for labour. Women keep the children on a slope that is no longer theirs.
Winter isolation is a rights fact too. When the KKH is blocked, a maternity case does not become a statistic until it is too late. DHQ-level care at Dassu is the demand. Specialist care is still a long ambulance ride toward Mansehra or Abbottabad.
Government colleges are few. Male literacy at 27 percent is itself low. Female literacy at 10 percent is the sentence that belongs on every education poster for this district. A girls’ primary school that stays open in Kandia through snow is the measure.
Sources: PBS 2023; tehsil literacy rows; Dassu tongue table; 2014 district split. September 2026.
The 2023 census counted 422,947 people in Upper Kohistan District, up from 307,286 in 2017 (annual growth 5.48%). 0% of the population lived in urban areas.
Upper Kohistan District covers 5,440 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 77.75 people per km².
Entirely rural: the 2023 census counted no urban population in Upper Kohistan District, so all 422,947 residents were enumerated in rural areas.
19.05% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 27.46%, female 10.28%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Kohistani (87.61% of the 374,183 people in the mother-tongue table), followed by Shina (11.05%).
Upper Kohistan District is in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Its headquarters is Dassu.