Punjabi religious vocabulary uses sant, baba, mahant, sadh, giani, granthi and jathedar for different things and the distinctions matter.
A granthi reads the Guru Granth Sahib Ji in a gurdwara and is an employee, not a priest, and any Sikh may do it. A giani is a learned person, formally someone with a qualification in Sikh studies. A jathedar heads a takht or a jatha.
Sant and baba are honorifics with no formal content, applied to figures with a personal following, and their use is contested precisely because the Sikh tradition has no ordained clergy and these titles function as one anyway.
The word dera means an establishment and covers everything from a two-room village seat to Radha Soami Beas.
The absence of ordination is doctrinally central and it produces a vacuum that personal authority fills, which is the mechanism behind the deras, behind the sant tradition and behind a substantial part of Punjab's religious politics.
A religion without priests has, in practice, more religious authority figures per capita than most, and that is not a paradox but a consequence.
A dera is an establishment around a living teacher, with its own practice, its own property and its own following, and Punjab has thousands of them.
Some are within Sikh practice, some are syncretic, and some are separate religions in all but name. Their following is disproportionately from communities the village gurdwara did not treat as equals.
They are also political. A dera's endorsement moves votes in a constituency, and the parties court them, which is why the confrontations between deras and Sikh institutions are never only theological.