Official records spell it Sinawan. The census counted 40,593 people in the town in 2023, up from 35,209 in 2017; it was not yet counted as urban in 1998. The wider Sinawan revenue circle, which includes the village of Khar Gharbi, had 139,427 people in 2017. The station sits between Gurmani and Kot Addu on the line from Multan.
Sanawan has always lived with the river. The gazetteer notes that Indus floods tend to spread over the low tract between the main stream and the town; settlement-era records describe a waterlogged depression around it, and the Sinawan protective embankment was breached by a high flood in the summer of 1924. In 2010 it was among the places inundated when the barrage's Left Marginal Bund broke.
The Khar family holds large lands in the tehsil, and Ghulam Mustafa Khar was born near here — Wikipedia says in Sanawan, the district gazetteer says in Khar Gharbi, a village inside the Sinawan revenue circle. Fatima Sugar Mills, one of the district's two big mills, stands near the town. A government boys' college for Sinawan appears among the gazetteer's recent projects, and the town has its own police station.
