Nawanshahrਨਵਾਂਸ਼ਹਿਰ

History

Nawanshahr — literally 'new town' — grew as a market centre of the central Doaba, serving the villages between the Beas and the Sutlej. For most of its life it was a tehsil town, first of Jalandhar district and later of Hoshiarpur. Its modern importance dates to 1995, when the Punjab government created Nawanshahr as the state's sixteenth district, carving it out of Hoshiarpur and Jalandhar, with the town as headquarters.

In 2008 the district was renamed Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar, honouring the revolutionary whose ancestral village, Khatkar Kalan, lies a few kilometres away near Banga — one of the rare Indian districts named for a freedom fighter. The city has since grown as an administrative and educational centre, and in the Swachh Survekshan 2020 cleanliness survey it was declared the cleanest city in North India, a civic achievement its residents cite with pride.

Geography & people

Nawanshahr stands at about 244 metres above sea level in the central Doaba plain, on the roads linking Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Banga and Balachaur. It is a municipal council and the seat of the district administration, courts and police. Punjabi dominates; the city mixes government servants, traders and professionals with the farming families of the surrounding villages. Like the rest of the Doaba, it has strong diaspora ties — NRI-funded houses, schools and hospitals dot the city.

The city's planned administrative complex, district courts and new residential colonies give it a more official character than the older qasbas around it.

Places of interest

Nawanshahr's great excursion is Khatkar Kalan — the Bhagat Singh museum and ancestral house near Banga. In the city, the district administrative complex, the town's parks and the bustling bazaar are the landmarks. Rahon, the old historic town nearby, and the Sutlej's edge at the district's southern boundary, make for short drives.

Notable people

Nawanshahr's distinction is civic: as a young district headquarters it has produced the administrators, judges and educators who run the district. Its name, though, belongs to its most famous adopted son — Bhagat Singh, in whose honour the district was renamed, and whose village draws a steady stream of pilgrims through the city's streets.