Mandi Gobindgarh, a small town on the Grand Trunk Road between Khanna and Sirhind, became one of the largest steel re-rolling centres in Asia. It is called Loha Mandi, the iron market.
It runs on scrap: induction furnaces melting scrap into ingots and rolling mills turning ingots into bars and sections, in hundreds of units within a few square kilometres. It supplies construction steel across northern India.
It grew without any state industrial plan, on private capital, cheap power and the road and rail junction, in a town of under seventy thousand people.
It has among the worst air quality in Punjab and has been on the Central Pollution Control Board's list of critically polluted areas.
The sequence, scrap in and bars out, with no ore, no port and no steel plant anywhere near, is one of the more unusual industrial geographies in India.
The furnaces run at night when power is cheaper, and the emissions that draw the most complaint come largely off that shift.
It is called the steel town of Punjab and it has no steel plant. Everything it makes starts as scrap bought from across India and imported through the ports.
The rolling mills supply construction bar to the whole northern market, so when building slows, Mandi Gobindgarh's furnaces stop first.