Dera Ghazi Khan is the old Baloch-founded river town that still gives its name to a whole division of southern Punjab. The city sits on the right bank of the Indus. Behind it the plain runs into the Koh-e-Sulaiman. For most of the last century Taunsa, Vehowa and the tribal hill tehsil were counted inside this district. Those tracts are now notified as Taunsa District. This page is the residual D.G. Khan: the city tehsil and Kot Chutta on the irrigated and torrent-cut plain. Fort Munro and the high Koh-e-Suleman road are next door, not inside the current three-digit district code in the same way they once were. Official site: dgkhan.punjab.gov.pk.
On the residual district, published 2023 tables give about 2,348,245 people in 292,658 households on about 3,814 km². Urban share about 25 percent. Literacy on that residual sheet is 43.98 percent — 47.78 percent for men and 35.64 percent for women.
Older combined tables that still print 3,393,705 people on 11,922 km² are counting D.G. Khan plus Taunsa and Koh-e-Suleman. Use the smaller sheet for the district that exists now; use the larger sheet only when a report is clearly talking about the pre-split map. Under-tens on the large sheet were about 1.15 million — a very young population either way.
Dera Ghazi Khan tehsil — 2,012 km², 1,443,409 people, literacy about 47.3 percent, about 41 union councils. This is the headquarters, the teaching hospitals and Ghazi University. About 36 percent of the tehsil is urban.
Kot Chutta — 1,802 km², 904,836 people, literacy about 38.6 percent, about 24 union councils. More rural, more torrent ground, weaker school row.
Taunsa (about 796,777 people) and Koh-e-Suleman (about 248,683 people, literacy about 36 percent, female literacy about 19 percent) belong to the new Taunsa District. They still share the same flood geology and the same Indus Highway.
On the large 2023 tongue table for the old district, Saraiki was about 2.76 million speakers and Balochi about 506,000. Urdu and Pashto were small city and road rows. Punjabi is a thin line here. In the hill tehsil now under Taunsa, Balochi is the household majority. In the city the street language is Saraiki. That mix is the Derajat, not central Punjab.
Ghazi University and the medical college / teaching hospital cluster make D.G. Khan the campus town for the division. Public graduate and women’s colleges sit in the city and Kot Chutta. Students from Rajanpur, Taunsa and parts of Muzaffargarh still come here. The campus names do not cancel Kot Chutta’s literacy row or the girls who never reach a secondary school after a torrent year.
The teaching hospital in D.G. Khan city is the referral point for the division. DHQ / allied public wards sit with it. Kot Chutta has a THQ. RHCs and BHUs cover the katcha and the foothill settlements, often several kilometres from the house. Serious trauma and obstetric cases from the torrent belt lose hours on cut roads. Private clinics cluster in the city; they do not replace a washed-out BHU.
Hill torrents. Rain on Koh-e-Sulaiman does not stay on the ridge. It comes down the Mithawan, Vehowa, Sanghar, Kora and neighbouring nullahs onto the plain. Houses, wheat stores and schoolrooms in the katcha flood in hours. This is not a one-year headline. 2022 damaged roads, crops and school buildings across D.G. Khan and Taunsa. Fresh surges were still cutting city links in 2026.
Schools that wash and do not reopen. After the 2022 floods, local counts spoke of dozens of damaged campuses in this district alone, on top of buildings that were already weak. Enrolment drops. Girls drop first. Female literacy at 36 percent on the residual sheet — and far lower in the old hill tehsil — is the long result of distance, early marriage pressure and classrooms that disappear after a wet July.
Health distance. A BHU four kilometres away is a walk in dry weather and a barrier when the torrent is up. RHCs can sit tens of kilometres from a foothill settlement. Maternal and child risk follows that map.
Heat and thin local work. Summers are severe. Canal tails and drinking water fail in the same season the torrent arrives. City jobs and the university do not employ the Kot Chutta majority. Remittances and daily labour fill the gap. Poverty on this plain is not an abstract rank; it is why a flood year becomes a school year lost.
A split administration. Flood drains, the Indus Highway and Fort Munro traffic still run across the new D.G. Khan / Taunsa line. Relief and school repair have to follow two deputy commissioners for one watershed. That is an administrative fact, not a complaint about the split itself.
Dera Ghazi Khan city, Kot Chutta, Shah Sadar Din, the Fort Munro road (now mainly administered with Taunsa), the Indus Highway settlements on the torrent belt.
Sources: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023 residual and pre-split tables; Government of Punjab, District Dera Ghazi Khan; flood and school-damage reporting from 2022 and later provincial relief notes; IWMI and district health distance descriptions for the Koh-e-Sulaiman piedmont. Checked September 2026.