ਮੋਗਾਮੋਗਾ

Moga district is a district in the Malwa region of Punjab, India, with its headquarters at Moga city. Formed on 24 November 1995 from Faridkot district, it is a wheat and rice heartland where Nestle built its first Indian factory in 1961. The 2011 census counted 995,746 people.

Where is Moga district?

Moga district is in central Malwa, in the south west of Indian Punjab, on the flat Sutlej plain between Ludhiana to the east and Ferozepur and Faridkot to the west. Bathinda lies to the south and Sangrur to the south east, and the district sits in the Ferozepur division of the state. Its headquarters, Moga city, stands on the Ferozepur to Ludhiana road at about 30.82 degrees north and 75.17 degrees east. The land is level canal and tubewell irrigated farmland, village after village laid out on the plain, with no hills and no large natural forest: this is some of the most intensively farmed country in Punjab.

How Moga became a district

For most of its recorded life this tract answered to larger neighbours. The Moga area first sat in Ferozepur district, and when Faridkot district was created on 7 August 1972, Moga tehsil moved into it from Ferozepur. Local demand for a district of its own grew through the following decades, and on 24 November 1995, under Chief Minister Harcharan Singh Brar, Moga became the 17th district of Punjab, cut out of Faridkot. The district took its present shape a few years later, when the Dharamkot block, with its 150 villages from the Zira side of Ferozepur, was merged into Moga. Older layers sit underneath the modern map: tradition links the Moga name both to the ancient king Maues and to Moga Gill of the Wadan Gills, and Sikh tradition remembers the district villages of Dagru, where Guru Har Rai is said to have stayed, and Dina, where Guru Gobind Singh rested after Chamkaur and from where, tradition records, the Zafarnama was sent to Aurangzeb.

Geography and people

The Census of India 2011 counted 995,746 people in Moga district: 525,920 men and 469,826 women, a sex ratio of 893 women for every 1,000 men, and 107,336 children under seven. The district administers 2,242 square kilometres, a density of 444 people per square kilometre, and it grew by 11.28 per cent over the 2001 census. This is still a rural district: 768,500 people, 77.18 per cent, live in villages, against 227,246 in the towns. Average literacy in 2011 was 70.68 per cent, 74.44 per cent for men and 66.48 per cent for women, below the Punjab average but rising fast between censuses. By faith the district is strongly Sikh: 82.24 per cent Sikh and 15.91 per cent Hindu in 2011, with small Muslim, Christian and Jain communities. Punjabi, in its Malwai form, is the language of home, school and bazaar. Moga is also widely called an NRI district, because so many of its families have members settled abroad, and money and ideas from Canada, the United States and beyond flow back into its villages.

Dairy, grain and the Nestle factory

Farming runs this district. Around 90 per cent of its land is agricultural, and Moga ranks among the largest producers of wheat and rice in Punjab, with maize, barley, cotton, oilseeds and potatoes also grown. The grain markets of Moga, Bagha Purana and Nihal Singh Wala fill at every harvest. On top of the grain sits the dairy economy that made the district famous. In 1961 Nestle India set up its very first manufacturing facility at Moga, and the plant, which produces milk products, turned the surrounding villages into a milk belt. The company has bought milk from tens of thousands of local farmers, collected twice a day from hundreds of village collection points, and in 2012 the factory directly employed around 2,400 people, with many more working through its suppliers. Around that anchor grew a wider food and farm industry, from rival dairy plants to workshops making farm machinery parts, and a well known local trade in vehicle modification in Moga city.

Towns, villages and places of interest

The district is administered through four subdivisions: Moga, Bagha Purana, Nihal Singh Wala and Dharamkot. Moga city is by far the largest centre, with 163,397 people in its urban agglomeration in 2011, an old grain market whose foundation plaque dates to 1906, and the shops and colleges of a district headquarters. Bagha Purana, a municipal council town of 25,206 people in 2011, works as the market and service centre of the south. Dharamkot counted 19,057 people in 2011, and the smaller towns of Kot Ise Khan and Badhni Kalan serve the northern and southern villages. Among the villages, Dhudike, about 17 kilometres east of Moga city, draws visitors as the birthplace of Lala Lajpat Rai, the freedom fighter known as Punjab Kesari, where a memorial marks his birthplace, and Dina keeps its Zafarnama gurdwara in memory of Guru Gobind Singh. Village pages for the district are being added across the Kosh.

Notable people and connections

The best known name from the district is Lala Lajpat Rai (1865 to 1928), born at Dhudike village, who became one of the leading voices of the Indian freedom movement and died after a police lathi charge during the 1928 protest against the Simon Commission at Lahore. Dhudike also gave Punjabi literature the novelist Jaswant Singh Kanwal. Moga city is associated with Narinder Singh Kapany, the physicist celebrated for his pioneering work in fibre optics, with the actor Sonu Sood, and with the cricketer Harmanpreet Kaur, who captains India in women's cricket. The district's everyday connections run through its mandis and its milk routes, but its cultural reach now runs just as strongly through the diaspora families who carry the Moga name to Canada and beyond.

Getting there and Moga today

Moga city sits on the Ferozepur to Ludhiana highway, long known as National Highway 95, with roads radiating to Jalandhar, Barnala, Kotkapura and Amritsar. The railway line between Ferozepur and Ludhiana runs through Moga station, tying the district by train to Ludhiana, Chandigarh, Ambala and Delhi, and government and private buses link every subdivision town with the district headquarters. There is no airport in the district; travellers use Ludhiana or Amritsar. Today Moga is a young district by Punjab standards, barely three decades old, but an old agricultural country underneath: a place where the morning still starts with milk collection and the mandi, and where a district headquarters town serves some of the most productive farmland in the state.