Abohar Ruralਅਬੋਹਰ ਰੁਰਲ

What is Abohar (Rural)?

Abohar (Rural) is a village in Abohar tehsil of Fazilka district, in the Malwa region of Punjab, India. It is the countryside that wraps around the city of Abohar: a single census village of 4,861 hectares whose fields, orchards and farmsteads surround the municipal area on every side, with the city itself only about 2 kilometres away. Its PIN code is 152116 and its Census 2011 village code is 035180. The arrangement is a familiar one around Punjab's older towns: the municipality governs the built-up city, while the land beyond its limits stays a village, however many people live on it. With 19,262 residents, Abohar (Rural) is one of the most populous villages in Punjab, yet it has no single centre. Travellers crossing this countryside see no village boundary at all: one dhani gives way to the next, and only the revenue record draws the line that makes them a single village.

A village of dhanis

The reason is the way this countryside is settled. Abohar (Rural) is governed through eight gram panchayats: Dhani Chirag, Dhani Karnail Singh, Dhani Roor Singh, Dhani Latkan, Dhani Shaffi, Dhani Karaka Singh, and Seed Farm Pacca and Seed Farm Kaccha. A dhani is a farmstead settlement, a cluster of homes built on a family's own fields rather than at a shared village site, and the south-western Punjab countryside is dotted with them. Two of these panchayats take their names from the government seed farm, whose Pacca and Kaccha farms form part of the village. To travel through Abohar (Rural) is to move from dhani to dhani along canal and field tracks, with the city's edge never far away. The pattern also shapes daily life: schools, water and worship must be spread across many small settlements instead of gathered in one centre.

Population

The 2011 census counted 19,262 people in Abohar (Rural), 10,666 men and 8,596 women, in 3,705 households. That is 806 women for every 1,000 men, a sex ratio well below the Punjab average and one of the starkest figures in the village's record. Scheduled Castes numbered 10,278, more than half the population, and children under seven numbered 2,567. Spread across its large area, the village had about 396 people per square kilometre.

Literacy in 2011 stood at 68.39 per cent, 76.61 per cent among men and 58.02 per cent among women, a gap of more than eighteen points between men and women that runs through the village's record like its low sex ratio. Households averaged a little over five people each, larger than in the urbanising villages near Punjab's cities, a mark of the joint farming families of the dhanis.

Work and the land: labourers, cotton and kinnow

Of the village's 4,861 hectares, 4,529 were net sown in 2011, and 3,509 hectares were irrigated, every one of them by canal. Canal water is the village's lifeline, while the 1,020 hectares of sown land that stayed unirrigated depended on the season. Electricity reached the dhanis for about 12 hours a day in 2011, with 8 hours a day recorded for agricultural use. Its workforce has an unusual shape. The census counted 7,377 workers, but only 925 of them were cultivators working their own land, while agricultural labourers numbered 2,970, more than three times as many. A further 3,382 people were other workers, many of them earning in Abohar's mandis, cotton ginneries, transport and trade. The village sits in the heart of Punjab's cotton and kinnow belt: the farmland around Abohar is the state's best-known kinnow country, and its orchards and cotton fields set the rhythm of work in the dhanis, from the winter kinnow harvest to the cotton season.

Faith and community life

Worship in Abohar (Rural) is local and scattered, like the settlement itself: each dhani keeps its own gurdwara or temple for its families, and for larger gatherings residents look to Abohar city, minutes away. The wider countryside carries one of Punjab's best-known stories of faith and nature. In the villages around Abohar, the Bishnoi community's protection of the blackbuck led to the Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary, notified in 1975 over the farmland of thirteen Bishnoi villages, where herds of blackbuck still graze among the fields. Those sanctuary villages are neighbours of Abohar (Rural) rather than part of it, but they define the landscape and the values of the area in which the dhanis stand.

Schools and facilities

For a village of its size, Abohar (Rural) was thinly served in 2011. The Village Directory recorded two government primary schools, a government middle school, a government secondary school and a government senior secondary school, but no health facility inside the village, with the nearest care within 5 kilometres in Abohar. No tap-water supply was recorded in the village in 2011, a gap that underlines the spread-out pattern: in a village of eight panchayats, every service has to be carried to many small settlements rather than gathered at one centre. The nearest post office and bank were also within 5 kilometres. Pucca, all-weather roads and both public and private bus services connected the dhanis to the city.

What is the population of Abohar (Rural)?

The population of Abohar (Rural) was 19,262 at the 2011 census, living in 3,705 households in Abohar tehsil of Fazilka district.