The Doaba, properly the Bist Jalandhar Doab, is the land between the Beas and the Sutlej: Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Hoshiarpur and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar. It is the smallest of the three regions by population and one of the more densely settled.
It has the highest Scheduled Caste population share of any region in Punjab, over a third, and is the region most identified with emigration abroad.
The Ghadar Party recruited most heavily here. The Babbar Akalis were a Doaba movement. The Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Hall is at Jalandhar. The Ravidassia movement is centred at Dera Sachkhand Ballan near Jalandhar.
Its holdings are small, its soil is good and its water table was the first to fall. Jalandhar's sports goods, Kapurthala's rail coach factory and Hoshiarpur's inlay work are its industries.
The Doaba abroad is Southall, Vancouver, Brescia and Yuba City. A Doaba village and its diaspora are one social unit conducted across eight thousand kilometres, and remittances, marriages and gurdwara politics all run both ways.
Its water table is falling, though not fastest in the state. The steepest decline is in central Punjab, in Sangrur, Barnala, Patiala and Moga, where the paddy area is largest. The Doaba's problem is different: very small holdings, so a great many pumps on each acre, and a tubewell density that arrived early and never came down.
Jalandhar, Phagwara and Nawanshahr between them hold the densest concentration of immigration agents, language centres and money transfer counters in India, and that trade is now larger in the Doaba than any of its manufacturing.
The Ravidassia movement, the Ad Dharm movement of the 1920s and the Dalit political organisation of the state are all Doaba in origin.
Academic work on Doaba migration and on the Ravidassia movement.