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Where is Amargarh Tehsil?

Amargarh Tehsil is a tehsil in the east of Malerkotla district in the Malwa region of Punjab, India, headquartered in the town of Amargarh on the Malerkotla to Patiala road. Raised from a sub tehsil in June 2021, when Malerkotla became the 23rd district of Punjab, it administers flat farming country of villages and grain markets.

Malerkotla district sits in the Patiala division of Punjab, bounded by Ludhiana district to the north, Barnala to the west, Patiala to the east and Sangrur to the south. Amargarh holds the eastern side of the district, toward Patiala, and its headquarters town stands at 30.46 degrees north and 76.01 degrees east, about 45 kilometres west of Patiala on the main road from Malerkotla. The district headquarters, Malerkotla city, lies to the north west of the tehsil. The countryside is flat Malwa farmland on the Indo-Gangetic alluvial plain, a patchwork of villages, fields and market roads, with no large river crossing the tehsil.

In administrative terms Amargarh is one of the three sub divisions of Malerkotla district, alongside Malerkotla and Ahmedgarh, and Amargarh is also the name of one of the district's three development blocks. It is a young tehsil in its present form. Because it was created in 2021, the Census of 2011 published no population total for it: in 2011 this country lay inside the Malerkotla tehsil of the old Sangrur district, and Amargarh itself was only a sub tehsil under the Malerkotla sub division. The present district as a whole counts 192 villages, and its Census 2011 population, counted in the old Sangrur frame, was 429,754 people. The Jugti tehsil directory currently lists 48 village pages under Amargarh, counted in October 2026.

The headquarters town of Amargarh

Amargarh town is a census town administered by a municipal council. At the Census of 2011 it counted 7,339 people, 3,864 men and 3,475 women, in 1,473 houses. Children under six numbered 802, or 10.93 percent of the town. Its sex ratio was 899 women per 1,000 men, close to the Punjab average of 895, and its child sex ratio was 835. Literacy in the town was 77.11 percent, above the Punjab average of 75.84 percent in the same census, with male literacy at 82.17 percent and female literacy at 71.54 percent. Scheduled Castes made up 30.86 percent of the town population, there was no Scheduled Tribe population, and 2,345 residents were recorded as workers, 96.12 percent of them in main work. In faith, the census counted the town as 53.45 percent Sikh, 39.35 percent Hindu and 6.85 percent Muslim.

For its villages, the town is where daily administration happens: the tehsil and sub division offices, the block development office and the municipal council all sit here, and the town's market serves the harvest trade of the surrounding fields. The town gives its name to the Amargarh assembly constituency of the Punjab Legislative Assembly. Its PIN code is 148022, its telephone code is 01675, and vehicles registered here carry the PB-92 series, the series allotted to Amargarh when the new district was formed.

From Patiala State to a tehsil of Malerkotla

The Amargarh country has a different princely past from its district headquarters. Malerkotla town was the seat of its own princely state, founded in 1454 and ruled by its Nawabs until 1948. The Amargarh region, by contrast, had been part of Patiala State before 1948. When the princely states were merged into the Patiala and East Punjab States Union, known as PEPSU, both the Malerkotla lands and the Amargarh country were placed inside Sangrur district. In 1956 PEPSU was dissolved and merged into the state of Punjab, and this arrangement lasted, with Amargarh as a sub tehsil of Malerkotla, for more than six decades.

The change came in 2021. On 14 May 2021, at the state level Eid-ul-Fitr celebration, Chief Minister Amarinder Singh announced that Malerkotla would become a district in its own right, a long standing local demand. On 2 June 2021 the Punjab cabinet gave formal approval, carving Malerkotla out of Sangrur as the 23rd district of Punjab, and approved upgrading Amargarh from a sub tehsil to a sub division and tehsil. The new district began with the three sub divisions of Malerkotla, Ahmedgarh and Amargarh, and new posts were sanctioned across twelve departments, from police and rural development to health and education, so that residents no longer had to travel to Sangrur for district level work.

Land, water and farming

The tehsil shares the climate the district administration describes for this part of Punjab: dry overall, with a short monsoon from July to mid September, a hot summer and a cold winter. District records for the old Sangrur frame put average annual rainfall at about 590 millimetres, rising toward the north east to about 670 millimetres at Malerkotla, with around 31 rainy days a year recorded at Malerkotla. Farming in Amargarh therefore depends on irrigation, through canals and groundwater, rather than on rainfall alone, and the flat alluvial fields are cropped intensively through the year under a large irrigated area.

The principal crops recorded for the Sangrur area, of which this tehsil was long a part, are wheat, cotton, sugarcane, gram and millet, and the modern rotation adds paddy in the summer season across the Malwa plain. Malerkotla district is also known as a major supplier of vegetables to this part of Punjab, and vegetable growing sits alongside the grain rotation in villages near the towns. The headquarters town's market collects produce from the surrounding villages, making Amargarh a trading point for its countryside as well as an administrative one.

People, faith and villages

Punjabi is the language of the tehsil, in its Malwai form: at the Census of 2011, 94.69 percent of the present Malerkotla district spoke Punjabi as a first language and 4.21 percent spoke Urdu. Faith across the district in the same census was 50.89 percent Sikh, 33.26 percent Muslim and 15.19 percent Hindu, a mix that reflects Malerkotla's history as a Muslim ruled princely state whose people stayed through Partition. The headquarters town itself is Sikh majority, and village life runs through gram panchayats and the Amargarh panchayat samiti. Among the tehsil's larger villages are Chaunda and Bagrian, each close to five thousand people at the Census of 2011, along with Banbhaura and Bhurthla Mander, while smaller settlements such as Sampurangarh, about 14 kilometres from Malerkotla, show how closely the villages are spaced on this plain.

The wider district carries one of the most solemn chapters of Sikh history just north of this tehsil. At Kup, about 12 kilometres north of Malerkotla city, the Wadda Ghalughara, the great massacre of 5 February 1762, took place during Ahmad Shah Durrani's sixth invasion of India, when a Sikh caravan of some 40,000 people, including women, children and the elderly, was attacked on its way toward the Malwa country and, by the accounts preserved in Sikh tradition, some 25,000 to 30,000 Sikhs lost their lives. The memorial gurdwara at Kup Rohira keeps that memory in the district, and it is the historic ground most closely tied to the Malerkotla country as a whole.

Getting to Amargarh Tehsil

The road is the tehsil's lifeline. Amargarh town stands on the main road from Malerkotla to Patiala, about 45 kilometres west of Patiala, and regular public and private buses link the town with Malerkotla city, the district headquarters, and onward to Patiala, Sangrur, Dhuri and Ludhiana. Village roads feed into this highway from every side, and most daily travel in the tehsil, for school, markets and government offices, is by bus, car or two wheeler. Amargarh has no railway station of its own: VillageInfo records Malerkotla station, code MET, as the nearest station for villages of this tehsil, on the Ludhiana to Delhi secondary line that serves Malerkotla city, and rail travellers continue from there by road. Dhuri Junction, south west of the district, is the larger railhead for longer journeys.