Nawanshahr was made a district in 1995 and renamed Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar in 2008, after the martyr Bhagat Singh Ji, whose ancestral village of Khatkar Kalan is in it. Its tehsils are Nawanshahr, Banga and Balachaur.
It is one of the smallest districts of Punjab by population and by area.
It holds Khatkar Kalan with the Bhagat Singh memorial and family house, Rahon which is an old mint town, and Banga which is the market centre of a very heavily emigrated belt.
Its eastern edge runs into the Kandi. Its Doaba portion has small holdings, good soil and an emigration rate among the highest in the state.
What is not recorded: the district's own village histories, which are almost entirely undocumented outside Khatkar Kalan, and the effect of emigration on its schools and land prices.
Balachaur tehsil is Kandi country, the broken foothill belt where the rain runs off before it can soak, and it has been the target of every watershed and check dam scheme the state has run since the 1980s. The gap in yield and in land price between Balachaur and Banga, forty kilometres apart, is as wide as any inside a single Punjab district.
Emigration from Banga, Nawanshahr and the villages around them is heavy and long standing, mostly to Britain and Canada, and the remittance economy is visible in the housing and in the schools.
Rahon, on an old bank of the Sutlej, was the seat of the Dallewalia misl. The mound there, and the mounds at several other villages in the district, have never been examined.