A rural Punjab address is village, post office, tehsil, district. The post office is often a different village, which is why letters to Punjab villages carry two names.
Villages are grouped for revenue purposes as a mauza and for the record as a hadbast number, a unique village number assigned at the first settlement and unchanged since. The hadbast number is the most reliable identifier of a Punjabi village and almost nobody outside the revenue department knows it exists.
Land is identified by khasra number within a village, recorded in the jamabandi, the record of rights, revised every four years, and held by the patwari.
Punjab's land records have been digitised and are searchable online, which makes the ownership of every field in the state a matter of public record.
The patwari, the village revenue official, is the single most consequential government position in rural Punjab and has been since the Mughals.
Anyone researching a village should start with its hadbast number, because names repeat and numbers do not.
An address runs from the person to the got or the father's name, then the village, then the post office, then the tehsil and the district. The post office is doing the work.
Villages share names constantly, which is why the post office and the tehsil are needed. There are dozens of places called Chak Sahib or Dhaliwal in the state.
The pin code system layered a number over all of it in 1972. The older form is still what people say and what is written on a wedding card.