Malout and Gidderbaha are the market towns of the south-western cotton belt in Sri Muktsar Sahib district.
Malout is a centre of the Punjabi jutti trade, with workshops making hand-stitched leather footwear, and a cotton and grain market.
Gidderbaha has been one of the most closely watched constituencies in Punjab politics for decades, having produced several senior figures of both main parties.
The belt around both towns is the one that the pesticide, groundwater and health reporting is about, and the one where cotton acreage has been falling in favour of paddy that the water table cannot support.
These are the towns a person from Bathinda or Ferozepur passes through and nobody outside the district has heard of, and between them they hold a craft trade, a cotton economy and a large share of the state's politics.
The jutti workshops are household units. The upper is embroidered, usually by women, the sole is stitched by men, and the work moves through traders in Malout who supply markets across north India.
Gidderbaha has returned chief ministers and party leaders for decades, and its constituency politics have shaped the state's out of all proportion to its size.
The cotton in this belt failed repeatedly through the 1990s and again in 2015, when whitefly destroyed most of the crop across the south west. The debt from those years has not been cleared.