ਭੋਗਪੁਰਭੋਗਪੁਰ

Bhogpur is a town and nagar panchayat in Jalandhar district of Punjab, India, in the Doaba region between the Beas and the Sutlej. It stands on the Jalandhar to Pathankot highway and is known across Punjab for its co-operative sugar mill, one of the oldest in the region, first crushing cane in 1956-57.

Where is Bhogpur?

Bhogpur is in the north of Jalandhar district, at about 232 metres above sea level, on National Highway 44, the road that runs from Jalandhar city towards Pathankot and Jammu. Kartarpur and Adampur are its nearest town neighbours in the district, and the state capital Chandigarh is about 172 kilometres away by the NH 344A route. The town has its own railway station, Bhogpur Sirwal (code BPRS), on the line between Jalandhar and Pathankot, and the nearest airport is Adampur, about 21 kilometres away. Its PIN code is 144201.

The town serves a wide circle of farming villages and has its own Dana Mandi, the grain market where the wheat and paddy of the surrounding countryside are traded. For the villages around it, Bhogpur is the everyday centre: the market, the mill gate, the railway station and the bus stop on the highway.

History: Bhatti villages and a new mill town

The countryside around Bhogpur was long associated with Bhatti Rajput landholders. The Jalandhar District Gazetteer of 1904 recorded Bhatti Rajputs as particularly numerous north of Jullundur tehsil, towards the Kapurthala border, where they held villages and large areas of cultivated land. Village names in the Bhogpur area, among them Bullowal, Kurala and Rani Bhatti, still carry that association. Wider tradition links the same Bhatti line to the founding of nearby Kapurthala, credited to Rana Kapur of Jaisalmer in the early eleventh century.

Bhogpur itself remained a large village until the years after independence, when two things changed it: the highway traffic that made it a stopping and trading point for the northern Doaba, and the co-operative sugar mill that gave the town an industry and a name across Punjab. It is now a nagar panchayat of thirteen wards, and its population has grown quickly: 4,896 people in 1991, 13,919 in 2001 and 17,549 in 2011.

What is Bhogpur known for?

Bhogpur is known for the Bhogpur Co-operative Sugar Mills. The plant was installed in 1955-56 at a cost of Rs 98.58 lakh, under the name Janta Co-operative Sugar Mills, and it crushed its first cane in the 1956-57 season. Government speakers at its 2020 relaunch described it as the first co-operative sugar mill of the region and the oldest sugar mill of the area, with 64 crushing seasons completed by then. In 1988 the mill took its present name, the Bhogpur Co-operative Sugar Mills Ltd.

On 23 November 2020 the Cooperation Minister, Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, inaugurated the renovated and expanded mill. The Rs 109 crore project raised crushing capacity from 1,016 to 3,000 tonnes of cane per day and added a 15 MW co-generation power plant, of which 8.54 MW was to be sold to the state power corporation. Machinery worth Rs 20.27 crore had been shifted from the closed Faridkot mill to complete the expansion. About 4,500 sugarcane farmers from 363 villages supply cane to Bhogpur, and the power plant was expected to bring the mill about Rs 42.50 crore in additional revenue, money meant to keep cane payments to farmers on time.

The mill has kept adding sidelines since. In July 2021 the award letter was handed over for a Rs 30 crore Bio-CNG project at Bhogpur, the second of its kind at a Punjab co-operative mill after Batala. It is designed to process 100 tonnes of press mud a day, the residue left after crushing, along with farm residue and other organic waste, leaving an organic manure behind. For a town of Bhogpur's size, the mill is employer, market and landmark in one.

Geography and people

The nagar panchayat covers about 4.65 square kilometres of flat Doaba farmland and administers 3,802 houses. The 2011 census counted 17,549 residents: 9,032 men and 8,517 women, a sex ratio of 943 women per 1,000 men against a Punjab average of 895. Children under seven numbered 1,790, about a tenth of the town. Scheduled Castes formed 35.22 per cent of the population. Hindus were 53.63 per cent of residents and Sikhs 43.98 per cent, with small Christian and Muslim communities. Literacy, at 87.53 per cent, was well above the Punjab average of 75.84 per cent: 91.07 per cent for men and 83.81 per cent for women. Of the town's people, 5,639 were recorded as workers, most of them in main, year-round work.

Punjabi is the language of daily life. The farming year around Bhogpur runs on the classic Doaba rotation of wheat, paddy and sugarcane, and in the winter crushing season the town's rhythm changes with the mill: tractor trolleys queue at the gate and the air carries the sweet smell of cane juice and jaggery.

Places of interest

The sugar mill complex is Bhogpur's landmark, a working piece of industrial heritage that visitors can see from the highway, with its chimney, cane yards and power plant. The town's own gurdwaras serve its neighbourhoods, and the villages around hold shrines of their own: gurdwaras remembering the sixth Guru at Sagranwali and Dalla, and the samadh of Shaheed Gur Iqbal Singh at Charke, about three kilometres away. The dera of Baba Jahar Peer at Laroi, a short distance from the town, draws devotees from the surrounding villages. The Dana Mandi and the highway bazaar, with its dhabas and sweet shops, give Bhogpur its busy road-town character.

Notable people

Bhogpur's literary link is Balbir Madhopuri, born on 24 July 1955 in Madhopur village, a short distance from the town. He worked as a child labourer and farm worker before earning a postgraduate degree in Punjabi, and his autobiography Chhangiya Rukh, published in Punjabi in 2002 and in English by Oxford University Press in 2010 as Changiya Rukh: Against the Night, is a landmark of Punjabi Dalit writing, rooted in the villages of this countryside. He has written fourteen books, translated more than thirty works into Punjabi, won the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize in 2013, and was a runner-up for the Dhahan Prize in 2021 with his novel Mitti Bol Payi. The mill's cane growers and workers, 4,500 farming families strong, are the town's other claim to fame: two generations of a co-operative that Punjab's farmers built themselves.