Punjab is around 37 per cent urban, above the Indian average, and its urban population is distributed across a very large number of small and medium towns rather than concentrated in a few cities.
Ludhiana, Amritsar, Jalandhar and Patiala are the four large cities. Below them are about a hundred and fifty towns of between ten thousand and two hundred thousand people, each serving a rural hinterland.
Those towns have the state's worst municipal finances, its weakest planning capacity and its most visible service failures: solid waste, sewage, drainage and drinking water.
Almost all of them have grown along a highway rather than around a centre, which is why a Punjab town is usually a ribbon.
The urban local bodies have limited own revenue and depend on state transfers, and the state's fiscal position is what it is.
Punjab's urbanisation has happened without urban planning to an unusual degree even by Indian standards, and the physical result is legible from any bus.
Punjab's towns grew on trade rather than on industry. The mandi, the bus stand and the road junction made almost all of them, which is why they are laid out along a line and not around a square.
A large number of settlements in the state are census towns: places that meet the population and occupation tests for urban and are still administered as villages, with a panchayat and no municipal budget at all.
That pattern is a strength on paper and a weakness in practice, because a small town gets no serious municipal capacity and each of them is on its own.