Ludhiana has been called the Manchester of India for a century, but there is no single place that records what got built here and when. This is an attempt at one.
Every business on the timeline is tagged with a founding year and a category. Each entry is marked one of two ways:
Verified year — the founding year was checked against a source we can link to (a company's own About page, a registry listing, a news article, an encyclopaedia entry).
Unverified — the year comes from commonly cited information but hasn't been confirmed against a primary source yet. Treat these as a best estimate, not a fact.
If you can point us at a source for an unverified entry, or correct one that's wrong, send it in — corrections are as welcome as new entries.
Anyone can submit. Fill in the form, and an admin reviews it before it goes live. We approve entries that are:
Closed businesses are absolutely welcome. A mill that ran from 1962 to 1998 is as much a part of the record as one still running.
Businesses are filed in a tree — for example Manufacturing › Textiles & Apparel › Hosiery & Knitwear. Clicking a parent category shows everything beneath it, so selecting "Manufacturing" includes every cycle, tool, yarn and steel unit in one view.
This archive will have errors in it, especially in the early decades where records are thin. If something is wrong, tell us. The point is to get it right over time, in public.