Gobindgarh

Gobindgarh or Mandi Gobindgarh is a city and a municipal council in Fatehgarh Sahib district in the Indian state of Punjab. It is also sometimes refered as Steel City (or Simply Loha Mandi) because of large number of steel mills and factories. It is a town located on the GT Road, 270 km north-west of Delhi and 35 km from Rajpura and is another industrial town in the state of central Punjab. As late as the 1930s, Gobindgarh was a small hamlet in the border area of the erstwhile state of Nabha, adjoining the then state of Patiala in Punjab.

In order to promote the business of blacksmiths, spread over a large number of villages in Nabha, the king of the state offered a number of fiscal incentives in the early 1940s. He declared the township a free trade zone and made land available at nominal rates for installation of steel re-rolling units. This move led to establishment of a number of workshops by the blacksmiths of the region on both sides of the GT Road at Gobindgarh. The first unit was possibly that of Ganga Ram – Asa Ram, set up before Independence. By 1959, there were 32 re-rolling units, the number going up to 40 in 1966. A rough estimate of investment up to the mid 1960s is Rs. 12 million (at prices of the time) with annual production level of 144 thousand tonnes.