Garhshankar and Balachaur are the towns of the Kandi belt where Hoshiarpur and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar districts meet the Shivaliks.
The country is broken by chos, the seasonal torrents that take fields and roads in the monsoon, and farming is rainfed on thin soil with small holdings.
The Kandi Canal, built from the 1980s, was intended to change that and reaches part of the belt.
Emigration from these villages is very high and remittance is the main income of a large proportion of households.
The Shivalik forest above the belt is the only substantial natural vegetation left in Punjab, and the relationship between its condition and the chos below it is direct and has been known since the nineteenth century.
The Kandi is the strip of broken country at the foot of the Shivaliks where the water table is deep and the soil is poor, and it is the one part of Punjab that the canal system and the tubewell mostly did not reach. Yields are low, holdings are small, and irrigation depends on rain and on what the chos leave.
The chos carry sand and gravel out of the hills each monsoon and lay them on the fields below. Check dams and afforestation have been the standard response since the 1950s, the results are uneven, and they are not systematically measured.
Emigration from these two tehsils is old, running to Britain from the 1950s and to Canada and Italy since. The villages carry the visible marks of it, the large houses standing closed, and an age profile that skews old.