The area which covers Mardan Division today was carved out of the Peshawar District between the
1931 and
1941 censuses of
the British India. The newly demarcated area was a Trans-Indus district designated as the Mardan District. The district comprised two tehsils initially, Mardan Tehsil and Swabi Tehsil, which later evolved to become two districts that forms today's Mardan Division. This setup continued until
One Unit, a geopolitical policy that abolished the provinces making up West Pakistan and consolidated West Pakistan into one province. Following the conclusion of the One Unit policy ended in 1970 and the subsequent reinstatement of the original provincial structure, the divisions that emerged during the policy period remained in the North-West Frontier Province. Thus, the Mardan District was situated within the Peshawar Division. The area received full-fledged division status between the
Pakistani censuses of
1981 and
1998, and during the same time period, Swabi Tehsil was also upgraded, to district status (becoming
Swabi District). In August 2000, the division was
abolished along with every other division in the country, but was
reinstated (with all the other divisions of Pakistan) eight years later after the
elections of 2008. == Geography ==