The town was called Chowk Munda; the old name survives in the Rangpur–Chowk Munda road. It was renamed after Captain Raja Muhammad Sarwar, the first recipient of the Nishan-e-Haider, who was killed on the Kashmir front in 1948 — Wikipedia gives the year of the renaming as 1983. He had no personal link to the town; it carries his name in his honour.
When Kot Addu became a district, Chowk Sarwar Shaheed became the headquarters of its second tehsil: 414,578 people over 1,785 km² in the 2023 census, about 15 per cent of them in towns. The town itself counted 63,421 people, up from 56,117 in 2017 and 26,355 in 1998.
The 2019 gazetteer notes that a large number of citrus orchards have been planted around Chowk Sarwar Shaheed and that more are coming. It also records that most of the district's Christians live in rural areas around the town, where most of its registered churches are. The town has a 50-bed hospital classed at tehsil level, government technical and women's vocational training institutes opened in 2010, and a municipal library. Unlike Kot Addu and Daira Din Panah, it is not on the railway.