The Kandi is the strip along the foot of the Shivaliks in Hoshiarpur, Rupnagar and Pathankot districts: broken ground, thin soil, seasonal torrents and no canal.
The torrents are called chos. They carry no water for most of the year and then take fields, roads and topsoil in an afternoon. Deforestation in the Shivaliks made them worse through the twentieth century, and the Hoshiarpur chos were a byword for erosion.
Kandi farming is rainfed. Yields are low, holdings are small and out-migration is high. The Kandi Canal, built from the 1980s, was intended to change that and reaches part of the belt.
The dry deciduous forest of the Shivaliks is the last significant natural vegetation in Punjab, and the state's forest cover overall is under four per cent, among the lowest in India.
Dholbaha in the Kandi has both a dam and a set of medieval temple sculptures recovered from the reservoir area, which is a fair summary of what the belt holds.
It is the only part of Punjab where the ground is not flat and where a field can be lost by the land moving rather than by the water going. Terracing, check dams and gully plugging are the standing works and every one of them has to be maintained by whoever farms below it.
The erosion was serious enough to produce a law. The Punjab Land Preservation Act of 1900, known as the Chos Act, controlled grazing and cutting on the hill slopes because the torrents had begun taking villages, and it is one of the earliest conservation statutes anywhere in India.
Emigration out of this belt is old and heavy and runs to the same countries the rest of the Doaba goes to. Poor land beside good land, both sending men abroad, is what Hoshiarpur district actually is, and the remittance shows in the houses on both sides of that line.