Batala was, from the 1950s to the 1980s, one of the largest foundry and machine tool centres in northern India, making lathes, agricultural machinery, pumps and castings. It was called the iron town.
The industry declined sharply from the 1980s. The reasons given are the militancy years, which cut investment and moved capital out of the border districts; power shortages; and the failure to modernise against competition from Ludhiana and from outside Punjab.
The border districts as a whole, Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Ferozepur, Fazilka, have far less industry than the interior. Investment does not go to a district with a hostile border twenty kilometres away, and this has been true continuously since 1947.
Batala's remaining foundries work below capacity and the town's young people leave.
The industrial map of Punjab has a hole along the border, and that hole is the single clearest economic consequence of the 1947 line after the loss of the canal colonies.
The town is much older than the industry. It was founded in the fifteenth century, was held by the Kanhaiya misl, and it is where Guru Nanak Dev Ji was married. Gurdwara Kandh Sahib marks the wall he is said to have sat beside, and a large mela is held there every year.
The workforce came out of the Ramgarhia artisan castes and out of the refugee settlement after 1947, and the units were family firms with a lathe and a furnace rather than factories. That structure starts quickly and it cannot raise capital, which is what finished it when the market moved.
What remains is small units working to order. The skilled workforce the cluster trained largely went elsewhere.