How to read the atlas

The 34 administrative units are proposed service areas within four existing provinces and Islamabad. Each of 136 Census 2023 reporting districts is assigned once. The count of 34 is a design hypothesis, not an official delimitation.

People and denominators

PBS Census 2023 district tables supply population, urban share, sex, age, literacy and households. The headline total is 241,499,431. Detailed tables cover 240,458,089 people; rates use their matching age or household denominators. Density divides population by summed PBS census district area, not map-polygon area.

What the map establishes

Display shapes derive from legacy OCHA/HDX district geometry. They do not certify current legal boundaries. Keamari has no separate source polygon: the Harbour–West population schedule includes it, but the legacy South/West union is not authenticated coverage of all three census districts. The Karachi inset and enlarged Islamabad marker aid selection; they are not to scale.

Boundary source: World Food Programme SDI, distributed by OCHA Field Information Services Section through HDX Pakistan COD-AB, under CC BY 3.0 IGO. CaL combined district polygons into proposed service areas and simplified the display geometry. These modifications are CaL’s analysis; the source organizations do not endorse them. Population data: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Census 2023. Download the attribution note.

Newer surveys

HIES and Labour Force Survey 2024–25 add provincial context. They do not provide estimates for these proposed administrative units. Census profiles do not establish travel times, water-network integrity, tax capacity or service costs.

Source-file hashes identify the exact files inspected for this edition. A reader can compare a downloaded publisher file with the recorded hash; a mismatch may reflect a changed publisher file and does not, by itself, establish an error. The inspected files are not rehosted here.

Checks and corrections

A direct-source audit corrected an initial Rajanpur extraction error before this edition. The district assignment and demographic totals were then checked. These checks validate the described calculations, not the policy merits of the boundaries or the currentness of every law.

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