Moga was made a district in 1995. Two things in it are known well beyond Punjab and neither is usually connected to the other.
The first is the Nestlé factory, opened in 1961 with a milk district built around it. The company put field staff into the villages, financed veterinary care and chilling centres, and paid on a schedule. Within a generation the Moga belt had shifted from subsistence dairying to a supply chain, and the model was studied and copied. It is one of the earliest and largest examples of contract dairying in India.
The second is Dhudike, a village in the district, where Lala Lajpat Rai was born in 1865. He died in November 1928 of injuries from a police lathi charge at Lahore during the Simon Commission protest, and the killing of the police officer Saunders by Bhagat Singh and Rajguru weeks later was answer to it.
Badduwal, also in Moga, sent twenty-six men of the 15th Sikh Regiment to the First World War, and seven did not come back. Karamjit Singh Kalia spent twenty-two years recovering five of the seven names from cremation records and Commonwealth War Graves registers.
The Moga agitation of 1972 began over cinema ticket prices and student entry and ended with police firing and deaths. It is remembered in Punjab as the start of a decade of student politics and is almost entirely absent from national accounts.
The town is a grain market and a road junction in the central Malwa and it became a district in 1995.
The Moga agitation of 1972, in which a student was killed and the protests that followed brought down a state government, is the political event the town is remembered for.
Dhudike and the villages around it produced Lala Lajpat Rai and Jaswant Singh Kanwal, and the district's emigration rate is among the higher ones in the Malwa.