Clustering prolongs energy resources, improves scalability and preserves communication bandwidth. Clustering is either classified as static and dynamic or as equal and unequal. In cluster based routing protocols that employ multi-hop communication, imbalanced energy consumption among the nodes results in hot-spots. Unequal clustering overcomes hot-spots but requires a high overhead and is prone to connectivity issues. To offer guaranteed connectivity and alleviate the hot-spot problem, a zone divisional hierarchical routing protocol has been proposed in this paper. The network is divided into equal sized static rectangular clusters which are assigned to two zones namely near zone and far zone. The zone facing the base station is known as the near zone and rest of the network space makes up the far zone which is further divided into sub-zones. Dual cluster heads approach for sharing the reception, aggregation and forwarding tasks is proposed. The performance evaluation of the proposed protocol against the existing protocols reveals that the method offers energy-efficient multi-hop communication support, uses negligible overhead, prevents creation of hot-spots, avoids early death of nodes, uses balanced energy consumption across the network and maximizes the network lifetime.