West Pakistan was the western province of Pakistan between 1955 and 1970, covering the territory of present-day Pakistan. East Pakistan, Balochistan, and the North-West Frontier Province experienced little difficulty, but Southern Pakistani Punjab faced considerable problems that had to be fixed. The communal violence spread to all over the Indian subcontinent. Economic rehabilitation efforts needing the attention of Pakistan's founding fathers further escalated the problems. India retained 345 million in population (91%) to Pakistan's 35 million (9%). Land area was divided as 78% to India and 22% to Pakistan. Military forces were divided up with a ratio of 64% for India and 36% for Pakistan. Most of the military assets – such as weapons depots and military bases – were located inside India; facilities in Pakistan were mostly obsolete, and they had a dangerously low ammunition reserve of only one week. In West Pakistan, the four provinces also struggled hard for the abolition of One Unit which caused injustices to them as it was imposed on them.
The provisional powerful committees pressured the central government through the means of civil disobedience, violence on street, raising slogans against the martial law, and attacks on government machines such as police forces. Finally, the committee's plan went into effect on 1 July 1970, when West Pakistan's "One Unit" was dissolved, and all power was transferred to the provinces of Balochistan, the North West Frontier Province, Punjab and Sindh.
Literacy rate
The literacy rate in Pakistan was 19.2%, in which East Pakistan had a literacy rate of 21.5% while West Pakistan had a literacy rate of 16.9%.
Ethnic groups
The major ethnic groups of West Pakistan was made up of Punjabis (62%), Pashtuns, Sindhis, Muhajirs, and Balochis.
Migration
During British India's partition, it was estimated that 15 million were displaced, and nearly more than 2 million consisting of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed in the deadly riots.
During the period between 1947 and 1950, 8.6 million Muslims had moved to specially Pakistan's West Punjab region and about 6.7 million Hindus and Sikhs had gone the other way to India's East Punjab region and thus changing the demography of Pakistan drastically and resulting in overwhelming Muslim majority to this region.
Religion
With the exception of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, all administrative divisions in the region that would compose West Pakistan after independence collected religious data, with a combined total population of 27,266,001, for an overall response rate of 92 percent. Similar to the contemporary era, where censuses do not collect religious data in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan, the total number of responses for religion is slightly smaller than the total population, as detailed in the table breakdown below.
According to the 1961 census, in West Pakistan, Muslims made up 97.2% of the population, Christians 1.4%, and the remaining 1.4% belonging to other religions.