Cantonments of Pakistan

Pakistan has 43 cantonments with their own cantonment boards that could be identified, each a garrison town with civil residents, run under the Cantonments Act by the Military Lands and Cantonments Department (filled squares). Twenty are in Punjab, eleven in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, eight in Sindh and four in Balochistan. They cluster along the old Grand Trunk Road from Peshawar to Lahore, where the British placed their frontier garrisons, and in Karachi, which has six boards. ML&C itself counts 44; the 44th could not be identified from the election lists. Another 32 places are called cantonments, on Wikipedia’s list, in a widely shared Pakistan Army infographic or in news and official sources, but have no cantonment board that could be found: army garrisons such as Gilgit, Skardu, Muzaffarabad, Miranshah, Khuzdar, Turbat, Jacobabad and Rahim Yar Khan (hollow squares). Wikipedia’s figure of 56 cantonments comes from a 2013 newspaper report; ML&C gave 44 in 2023. Each square sits at the cantonment area where GeoNames has one, otherwise at its town.