Mansaਮਾਨਸਾ

History

Mansa district was created in 1992, carved out of Bathinda, and sits at the southern edge of Punjab where Malwa meets Haryana and Rajasthan. It is deep cotton country, part of the great cotton belt that runs across southern Malwa, and its economy has turned on the white gold for generations.

The district's towns grew as mandi centres for the cotton and grain trade. Budhlada, the largest, sits on the railway line and runs one of the busy procurement mandis of the region. Sardulgarh, near the Haryana border, serves the southern villages, while Mansa town itself holds the district headquarters and the old grain market.

The cotton economy

Cotton shapes everything here: the sowing calendar, the labour migration at picking season, the ginning factories on the town outskirts. About 770,000 people were counted in the district in 2011, spread across roughly 2,174 square kilometres, most of them tied directly or indirectly to the crop. Wheat follows cotton in the winter cycle, and the district's tubewells run deep in a region where water tables have fallen.

Towns and villages

The district's three tehsils are Mansa, Budhlada and Sardulgarh, with towns like Bareta and Joga serving as smaller mandi centres. Mansa district was the pilot for the Kosh village project, and its village pages are already live, each with population, tehsil and census data. Village-level pages for the district are complete and being deepened.