ਪੱਟੀਪੱਟੀ

Patti is an old town in Tarn Taran district of Punjab's Majha region, about 45 kilometres from Amritsar. Home to 40,976 people at the 2011 census, it is a municipal council and the headquarters of its tehsil, best known for Gurdwara Bibi Rajni Ji and as the birthplace of pioneering nephrologist Kirpal Singh Chugh.

Where is Patti?

Patti stands at 31.28° N, 74.87° E in the Majha belt of Punjab, at an elevation of about 209 metres. It is roughly 45 kilometres from Amritsar by road, the district headquarters Tarn Taran lies to its north-east, and Khem Karan is further down the same rail line to the south-west. The town's PIN is 143416, its telephone code is 01851, and vehicles carry PB-38 plates. Patti is a municipal council and the headquarters of Patti tehsil, one of the four tehsils of Tarn Taran district alongside Tarn Taran, Khadur Sahib and Bhikhiwind.

ਇਤਿਹਾਸ

Patti's roots go deep. Its older name was Patti Haibatpura, later shortened; in Punjabi, patti means a street. One account calls it '9-lakhi Patti' for the nine lakh rupees of revenue it once yielded, though that figure comes from a single exam-prep source. The Scottish traveller Alexander Burnes mentioned it as 'putee', a town of 5,000 people, in his 1834 book Travels into Bokhara. A fortress built in 1755 stood over the town and housed the local police station until 2003, according to an archived local account. In the misl era the town was finally won by the Faizalpuria, or Singhpuria, Misl. Before Partition, Patti was a sub-tehsil of Kasur tahsil in Lahore district of British Punjab. Under the Radcliffe Award, 186 villages along with the towns of Patti and Khem Karan were assigned to East Punjab, making Patti part of independent India. The 1941 census counted 17,595 people in the town: 73.2 percent Muslim, 16.04 percent Hindu, 8.5 percent Sikh and 2.05 percent Jain. When Tarn Taran district was formed in 2006, carved out of Amritsar district as Punjab's 19th district, Patti became part of the new district.

Geography & people

The 2011 census counted 40,976 residents in Patti: 21,668 men and 19,308 women in 7,607 households. Literacy stood at 69 percent. The town's religious makeup was 30,432 Sikhs, 9,743 Hindus, 511 Jains, 133 Christians, 100 Muslims and 3 Buddhists. Patti sits in wheat and paddy country, and its economy rests largely on agriculture and allied activities, with a grain market serving the surrounding villages.

Gurdwara Bibi Rajni Ji

Patti's best-known landmark is Gurdwara Bibi Rajni Ji, which stands on the site where Bibi Rajni is said to have lived with her parents and four sisters, near the railway station. The traditional account told at the gurdwara runs like this: Bibi Rajni was the youngest daughter of Rai Duni Chand, the revenue collector of Patti. When she credited God rather than her father for the family's comforts, he married her in anger to a man suffering from leprosy. While she served in the community kitchen of ਗੁਰੂ ਰਾਮਦਾਸ ਜੀ at Amritsar, she left her husband resting beside a pond; he saw crows turn from black to white after bathing in it, bathed himself, and was healed. The couple then paid homage to Guru Ram Das Ji, and the pond is associated with the Dukh Bhanjani Beri site at the Golden Temple. This is the traditional Sikh account rather than documented history. The town also has Gurdwara Baba Bidhi Chand Ji, and an old Shiva temple on a mound to the south-east along with a Jain temple.

Notable people

Patti's most distinguished son is Dr Kirpal Singh Chugh, born here on 12 December 1932 and remembered as the father of nephrology in India. The country's first qualified nephrologist, he set up India's first nephrology department at PGIMER Chandigarh in 1963 and received the Padma Shri in 2000; he died on 17 September 2017. The town's politics have long run through the Kairon family of nearby Kairon village, about three kilometres away. Partap Singh Kairon, Punjab's third chief minister from January 1956 to June 1964, was born in Kairon village on 1 October 1901 and won the Patti assembly seat in 1952. His relative Adesh Partap Singh Kairon held the Patti seat four times from 1997 to 2012. Harminder Singh Gill of the Congress won it in 2017, and Laljit Singh Bhullar of the Aam Aadmi Party took it in 2022 with 57,323 votes. Bhullar served as Punjab's transport and hospitality minister until March 2026, when he resigned after being named in reports around the suicide of a Punjab Warehousing Corporation official; he remains the sitting MLA. Patti is constituency No. 23 of 117, under the Khadoor Sahib Lok Sabha seat.

Getting there

Patti has its own railway station, code PAX, on the Amritsar-Khem Karan DEMU branch line, a 77-kilometre route that runs through Bhagtanwala, Tarn Taran, Rure Asal, Kairon, Patti, Boparai, Gharyala, Valtoha, Rattoke Gurdwara and Khem Karan, with four DEMU trains each way daily. By rail it is about 44 kilometres from Amritsar Junction and 34 kilometres from Khem Karan; Tarn Taran station is roughly 21 kilometres away. The town also has a bus terminal with services across the region.

ਅੱਜ

Today Patti is the bazaar, court and college town for its tehsil in the border belt of Majha. Guru Nanak Dev University College, Patti, is a constituent college of GNDU, and the town also has the Shiv Shankar Institute of Engineering and Technology, established in 2004 and approved by the AICTE, plus a polytechnic and pharmacy college. Its schools include DAV, Sacred Heart Convent and Cambridge International among others. In September 2021 Patti became Punjab's first border town to give the first COVID-19 vaccine dose to all eligible residents, the Tribune reported, in a drive led from the government hospital.