Tehsil
A tehsil (Urdu: تحصیل; also known as tahsil, tahasil, taluka, taluk, taluq, and mandal) is an administrative division of some countries of South Asia.
Generally, a tehsil consists of a city or town that serves as its headquarters, possibly additional towns, and a number of villages. As an entity of local government, it exercises certain fiscal and administrative power over the villages and municipalities within its jurisdiction. It is the ultimate executive agency for land records and related administrative matters. Its chief official is called the tehsildar or less offcially the talukdar or taluka muktiarkar.
Variations
It should be noted that tehsil and taluka and their variants are used as English words without further translation. Since these terms are unfamiliar to English speakers outside of the subcontinent, the word county has sometimes been provided as a gloss, on the basis that a tehsil, like a county, is an administrative unit hierarchically above the local city, town, or village, but subordinate to a larger state or province. However, India and Pakistan have two (or more, at least in parts of India) intermediate levels of hierarchy—the District and the tehsil, both of which are sometimes glossed as county. In neither case is the analogy very precise in specific details.
Pakistan
In Pakistan, the term tehsil is generally used except in Sindh where the term taluka (Urdu: تعلقه) predominates e.g. Larkana Taluka.[1] The tehsil is the second-lowest tier of local government in Pakistan; each tehsil is part of a larger District (Zilla (Urdu: ضلع)). Each tehsil is subdivided into a number of Union Councils
Republic of India
The term taluka or taluk is used in some States, including Gujarat, Goa, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, and tehsil in others, such as Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Andhra Pradesh used to have taluks (with Firkas under them), but these have now been replaced with mandals. In addresses the abbreviation TK often appears.
Each taluka or tehsil is part of a larger District within a State or Union Territory. In some cases, the tehsils of a given District are organized into smaller groups of tehsils called Sub-Division (Pargana, Anuvibhag).
In India there has been research on making talukas self sufficient in energy.[2]
The governmental bodies called the panchayat samiti operate at the tehsil level. The villages of a tehsil are grouped into smaller clusters known as hobli.