Vehari is a rare gazette: three tehsils of almost the same weight. Headquarters is not the largest town. Burewala is. Mailsi speaks more Saraiki than Punjabi. The name is a water-passage — wah, viah — cut from Multan District on 1 July 1976 so cotton and maize could have their own commissioner. This page is three mandis on one Sutlej sheet, not a shrine twin and not another Multan suburb essay.
The 2023 census counted 3,430,421 people in 543,036 households on 4,364 km². Urban about 783,000. Literacy 59.10 percent — 66.43 among men, 51.57 among women. Phone 067.
Burewala — 1,204,255 people, literacy 63.98 percent, the strongest reader and the biggest city (361,664 in the municipal count). Mailsi — 1,120,407, 54.63 percent; first language there leans Saraiki. Vehari tehsil — 1,105,759, 58.21 percent, headquarters, not the heavyweight. Jallah Jeem sits as a growing town on the same sheet.
Before 1976 this was Multan’s east. Canal squares, Sutlej weather, cotton that paid when the price held. Burewala and Vehari mandis were settling in the 1920s. Mailsi is the older civic room. Partition filled the emptied Sikh and Hindu commercial streets from the other side of the new line. The 1976 dinner that announced the district is local political memory. Cotton, wheat and maize still write the year.
Waqar Younis — Burewala Express — is the name the cricket world already filed against this pin. Fast, reverse-swing, a captain later, a coach later. Muhammad Irfan, also Burewala, is the tallest man to play international cricket. Neither is a Multan import. Major Tufail Mohammad, Nishan-e-Haider, is buried in Burewala; the official district roll keeps his East Pakistan action on this page without turning it into a war manual. Saleem Sherwani, hockey goalkeeper, is Vehari’s other national kit. Haji Sher Dewan’s shrine near Burewala is the older spiritual address. Assembly houses rotate with Jatt and migrant tickets. Rajesh Khanna’s ancestral-village talk is a film footnote, not a census column.
Mailsi’s language table is the honest surprise: Saraiki first for a majority there, Punjabi first on the Burewala-Vehari side. The district is one file with two mouths. That is why this page is not written as a copy of Khanewal or Lodhran. Three mandis. One river. A women’s literacy row still near half. A fast bowler the rest of the planet already knows how to spell.
Census 2023. District date 1 July 1976. Cricket and Nishan-e-Haider from the published roll.