Ludhiana makes a very large share of India's bicycles and bicycle parts. Hero Cycles was founded by the Munjal brothers, who came from Kamalia in what was then Montgomery district and is now Toba Tek Singh, and who had moved to Amritsar before Partition. It became at one point the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world by units.
The industry is built the same way as the hosiery: a few assemblers at the top and hundreds of small units making rims, spokes, chains, freewheels, saddles and brakes, in workshops across the city.
It supplied the cheap bicycle that moved rural India for fifty years, at a price point no imported machine could match.
The Munjals went from bicycles into motorcycles with Hero Honda in 1984, which became the largest two-wheeler maker in India by 2001.
The refugee families who built these firms arrived in 1947 with nothing and the industry they created is the reason Ludhiana is not an agricultural market town.
The cluster covers frames, rims, chains, freewheels, pedals, saddles and tyres, and a bicycle can be assembled entirely from parts made within a few kilometres of each other.
Imports and the shift from utility cycling to two-wheelers cut the domestic market. The cluster's answer has been export and higher value bicycles, with mixed results.
The small units run on thin margins and on credit from the assemblers, so a slowdown at the top is felt in the workshops within weeks.