ਨਂਗਲਨੰਗਲ

Nangal is a planned township and municipal council in Rupnagar district of Punjab, India, at the foot of the Shivalik hills on the Sutlej river. It was laid out from 1948 for the Bhakra Nangal project, and its dam, hydel channel, fertilizer plant and Ramsar listed wildlife sanctuary still define the town today.

Where is Nangal?

Nangal is in the north of Rupnagar district, about 100 kilometres from Chandigarh, where the Sutlej leaves the Shivalik hills for the plains. The town spreads over both banks of the river at about 326 metres above sea level, at 31.385 degrees north and 76.375 degrees east. Upstream, across the Himachal Pradesh border, stands the Bhakra Dam above its Gobind Sagar reservoir. Downstream the river runs towards Rupnagar town, the district headquarters. Anandpur Sahib, the city founded by Guru Gobind Singh in the same foothills, is its best known neighbour, with Kiratpur Sahib beyond it.

History: a town built for a dam

Before the project there was no town here to speak of. Present day Nangal stands on land acquired from nearby settlements in 1948, when construction of the Bhakra Dam was planned on the Sutlej. Engineers, workers and their families needed a base at the river, and a planned township was laid out for them, with sectors, tree lined avenues, schools, hospitals and clubs. Project families came from across India, which is why Nangal has always felt more cosmopolitan than its size suggests, a river town of many languages living by one project.

The town grew in three parts that still structure it: the original Nangal, Nangal Township by the dam, and Naya Nangal, the planned colony that serves mainly as the township of the National Fertilizers complex. The Bhakra project was built from 1948 to 1963 and dedicated to the nation by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on 22 October 1963. Administration of the Bhakra Nangal project passed to the Bhakra Management Board on 1 October 1967 under the Punjab Reorganisation Act, and the board took its present name, the Bhakra Beas Management Board, on 15 May 1976.

The young town also had a moment in diplomatic history. The Ramsar record for its wetland notes that it was on the banks of the Nangal Dam that Nehru and the Chinese premier Chou En Lai formalised the Panchsheel, the five principles of peaceful coexistence, in 1954, the year the dam itself was completed.

The Nangal Dam and the Bhakra Nangal project

Nangal Dam is the downstream partner of Bhakra. Built across the Sutlej about 13 kilometres below the Bhakra Dam, it is a gravity structure 28.96 metres high and 291.08 metres long, with 26 bays. It works as a balancing and diversion dam: water released from Bhakra is evened out here and turned into the Nangal Hydel Channel, which the Bhakra Beas Management Board lists at 61 kilometres long with a capacity of 12,500 cusecs. A board tender document dates the dam's construction to 1947 to 1954 and its commissioning to 8 July 1954, when the hydel channel and the first Bhakra canal network were declared open.

On the channel stand the power houses of Ganguwal and Kotla, which the board lists with a combined installed capacity of about 153.7 megawatts. A road bridge and a single broad gauge railway line cross the dam itself, the railway running to the fertilizer plant at Naya Nangal and on towards Himachal Pradesh. The wider Bhakra Nangal project, run by the board, regulates water and power from the Sutlej for Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and Chandigarh. The reservoir formed behind the Nangal Dam as part of the project, in place by 1961, became the town's lake, and in time its wetland.

Geography and people

Nangal spreads on both sides of the Sutlej at the foot of the Shivaliks, and Nangal Township is nearly enclosed by its setting: water on three sides and foothills on the fourth, in the description carried in accounts of the town. Its neighbourhoods keep the project map: Modern Avenue, Shivalik Avenue, the BBMB Township and Naya Nangal, with the older Nangal Basti along Railway Road, and industry in the Focal Point area and the fertilizer complex.

The municipal council counted 41,172 people in the 2011 census, up slightly from 40,694 in 2001, and the wider urban count, including the outgrowth, was 48,497: 25,317 men and 23,180 women. Scheduled Castes numbered 12,323 of that urban total, about a quarter. Punjabi is the official and everyday language, with Hindi widely spoken in a town settled from across India. Jawahar Market, Main Market, Adda Market, GTB Market and Pahari Market carry its daily trade, and the town is served by the BBMB Hospital, the NFL Hospital in Sector 4 and the Civil Hospital.

Industry gave the township its second anchor. National Fertilizers Limited was incorporated on 23 August 1974, and in 1978 the Nangal fertilizer plant of the Fertilizer Corporation of India was transferred to it. The Nangal unit, one of the company's five ammonia and urea plants and since converted from fuel oil to natural gas feedstock, remains the defining presence of Naya Nangal, whose colony, schools and stadium were built around it.

Places of interest: dams, lake and sanctuary

The dams are the first sight: the road and rail crossing at Nangal Dam, the hydel channel leaving for Ganguwal and Kotla, and upstream the great wall of Bhakra above Gobind Sagar, which draws visitors from across India. In town, Naya Nangal's planned parks, among them Madhuvan Park and Captain Amol Kalia Park, and the NFL Stadium show the colony side of Nangal, while Gurdwara Bhabour Sahib and the town's temples and churches serve its mixed population. Most visitors combine Nangal with Bhakra Dam and with Anandpur Sahib and Kiratpur Sahib in the same foothill belt.

The Nangal Wildlife Sanctuary covers 116 hectares of the reservoir and its Shivalik shore. Punjab declared the wetland a wildlife sanctuary in 2009, and on 26 September 2019 it was designated a Ramsar site, number 2407. The Ramsar information sheet records annual waterbird counts between about 5,300 and 6,100 birds in the counts of 2017 to 2019, with 55 migratory waterbird species, and lists threatened residents including the Indian pangolin, the Egyptian vulture, the leopard and the hog deer among more than 150 bird species reported at the site. Winter, when the migratory waterbirds arrive, is the season for birdwatchers.

Getting there

By rail, Nangal Dam station, code NLDM, on Railway Station Road serves Nangal, Nangal Township and Naya Nangal together. It stands on the Sirhind to Una line in the Ambala division of Northern Railway, with three platforms and a single electrified track, and its trains include the services to Ambala, the Saharanpur MEMU, the Gurumukhi Superfast and the passenger trains into Himachal Pradesh towards Amb Andaura and Daulatpur Chowk. By road, buses link the town with Rupnagar, Chandigarh, Una and Anandpur Sahib, and pilgrim traffic for the foothill shrines passes this way. The town PIN codes begin with 140124 and its telephone code is 01887.

Nangal today

Today Nangal remains what it was built to be: a project town kept by two great public employers, the dam board and the fertilizer plant, with their hospitals, project schools such as the BBMB DAV School and the fertilizer model school, and the clubs, swimming pool, golf course and sports grounds that few Punjab towns of its size can match. Its census growth is slow, 41,172 residents in 2011 against 40,694 a decade earlier, because the township was planned complete and has little room or reason to sprawl. Its newest identity is ecological: the Ramsar listing of 2019 has put a small industrial township on the world map of wetlands, and the lake its builders made for power is now protected for birds.