Rajpura sits on the Grand Trunk Road at the junction where the road and rail lines from Delhi split toward Ludhiana and toward Ambala and Chandigarh.
Rajpura Township was built in 1948 as a planned settlement for refugees from west Punjab, one of a small number of purpose-built refugee towns in India. Its grid layout dates from that decision.
It became an industrial town on the strength of the junction: engineering, food processing and, later, one of Punjab's larger thermal power plants at Banur.
It is in Patiala district and functions as a satellite of both Patiala and Chandigarh.
A refugee township built in 1948 and still called the township by its residents is a fair example of how completely 1947 reorganised the map of east Punjab.
The township was laid out on a grid with numbered blocks and a market at the centre, and it was among the first planned settlements built by the new Indian government for refugees. The work overlapped in time with the planning of Chandigarh, thirty kilometres north.
Its residents came mostly from the western districts and the town has no pre-1947 village core to speak of. Everything in it was built by people who arrived with nothing and were allotted a plot.
The junction that made it works against it now, since the traffic passes through rather than stopping. Its industry is medium scale and a large part of its skilled workforce commutes to Mohali and Chandigarh.