Dhuri in Sangrur district is a railway junction town, and it grew because the line from Ludhiana to Jakhal and the line to Patiala met there.
It was in Jind state territory and its development followed the state's railway.
Its economy is grain trade, a sugar mill and small industry, and it sits in the belt of the Malwa with the deepest agrarian distress figures in Punjab.
It has become politically prominent in recent years as a constituency.
A junction town in a state that has lost most of its passenger rail traffic to buses is a particular kind of place: built for a function it no longer performs, still there, still full.
Dhuri has a large cooperative sugar mill, one of the few in the state still operating, and its cane belt is a remnant of a crop that once covered far more of the Malwa.
The Jind state railway that made the town was built to move that state's grain, and the alignment still carries freight for the same reason.
The Bhawanigarh and Sherpur belt around it holds the villages with Punjab's highest recorded farm suicide figures, which is the context for everything else on this page and is not visible from the town.