Phagwara on the Grand Trunk Road grew around a sugar mill established in the 1930s by the Oswal and Jagatjit interests, and the Jagatjit Cotton Textile Mills, which was one of the largest industrial employers in Punjab for decades.
The town is a Doaba emigration centre. Its bank branches, travel agencies and IELTS centres are the visible economy, and the money moving through it comes from abroad.
It was part of Kapurthala state until 1947 and its administrative history is therefore separate from the districts around it.
The mills declined from the 1990s. The employment they provided is gone and the town runs on remittance, education services and transport.
Phagwara is a good place to see the whole arc of Punjab's industrial century compressed into one main road.
Kapurthala's rulers put money into industry when very few princely states did, and the group that grew out of that had a sugar mill, a distillery, a textile plant and a paper works within a few kilometres of each other. The housing, the school and the club built for the workforce are still standing.
The town sits where the Grand Trunk Road meets the roads to Hoshiarpur and Nawanshahr, which is why the Doaba's emigration business concentrated here. Agencies, coaching centres and money transfer counters occupy the main road.
Lovely Professional University, opened nearby in 2005, is among the largest private universities in India by enrolment and has changed the town's economy more in twenty years than the mills did in seventy.