Ludhianaਲੁਧਿਆਣਾ

History

Ludhiana was founded in the late fifteenth century under the Lodhi sultans of Delhi, and named for the Lodhi chiefs who held this stretch of the Sutlej. It remained a modest walled town through the Mughal period, then grew under Sikh rule as a trading post between Delhi and Lahore. The British made it a cantonment and district headquarters, and after 1947 it absorbed Partition refugees who brought artisan and trading skills that seeded its industry.

From those beginnings the city grew into Punjab's largest, its old walled quarters now ringed by industrial estates stretching for miles along the highways.

The industrial engine

Ludhiana's hosiery cluster makes it one of the great knitwear centres of Asia, its bicycle industry once produced the cycles of a nation, and its auto-part, agricultural-implement and machine-tool workshops supply factories across India. The city's traders and small manufacturers built this economy unit by unit, and the district's per-capita industry remains the densest in Punjab.

The Punjab Agricultural University, founded in 1962, anchors the district's other identity: as the research home of the Green Revolution. Its scientists bred the wheat varieties that made Punjab the granary of India, and its campus remains a landmark of the city.

The rural district

Beyond the city, Ludhiana district is prime Malwa farmland, with about 3.5 million people counted in 2011 across roughly 3,744 square kilometres. Khanna's grain market is often described as among the largest in Asia, and the towns of Jagraon, Samrala, Payal and Raikot each run great mandis in season. Village-level pages for Ludhiana district are being added to the Kosh.