Rawalpindi is the capital city of Rawalpindi Division located in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Rawalpindi is the fourth-largest city proper in Pakistan after Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad respectively while the larger Islamabad-Rawalpindi metropolitan area is the country’s third largest metropolitan area.
Rawalpindi is an important administrative, commercial, and industrial centre. Its industries include locomotive works, gasworks, an oil refinery, sawmills, an iron foundry, a brewery, and cotton, hosiery, and textile mills; it also produces shoes, leather goods, pottery, newsprint, and tents.
It is also famous for its Historical Places. One of them is Purana Qila, constructed by Ghakhar, destroyed by Sikhism, and later on, new city was established, now New Rawalpindi.
Urdu is the mother tongue of few people, but being the national language is spoken and understood by a sizeable population. English is also understood and spoken by the sizeable educated elite. Pashto which is also spoken by sizeable population in the Rawalpindi city.
The first Muslim invader, Mahmud of Ghazni (979-1030), gifted the ruined city to a Gakkhar Chief, Kai Gohar. The town, however, being on an invasion route, could not prosper and remained deserted until Jhanda Khan, another Gakkhar Chief, restored it and named it Rawalpindi after the village Rawal in 1493.
It is the country’s third largest metropolitan area. Rawalpindi is adjacent to Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, and the two are jointly known as the “twin cities” on account of strong social and economic links between the cities.
It features a humid subtropical climate (Köppen: Cwa) with hot and wet summers, a cooler and drier winter. Rawalpindi and its twin city Islamabad, during the year experiences an average of 91 thunderstorms, which is the highest frequency of any plain elevation city in the country. Strong windstorms are frequent in the summer during which wind gusts have been reported by Pakistan Meteorological Department to have reached 176 km/h (109 mph). In such thunder/wind storms, which results in some damage of infrastructure. The weather is highly variable due to the proximity of the city to the foothills of Himalayas.
The average annual rainfall is 1,254.8 mm (49.40 in), most of which falls in the summer monsoon season. However, westerly disturbances also bring quite significant rainfall in the winter. In summer, the record maximum temperature has soared to 47.7 °C (118 °F) recorded in June 1954, while it has dropped to a minimum of −3.9 °C (25 °F) several occasions, though the last of which was in January 1967.
