Una, amalgam of Punjabi and Pahari cultures
Rajesh Sharma
Una, the third smallest district of Himachal Pradesh, is a place where the the deep-rooted Punjabi culture from the South mellows down to make way for the much-softer Pahari culture, as one traverses up the hilly terrain from the district headquarters towards Bangana or Chintpurni. People from higher reaches of the state seeking better road connectivity, access to tertiary healthcare and higher education hubs prefer to make Una a second-home destination. With a sizeable population of Sikhs and Muslims in the district besides Hindus, the demography of the city and the suburbs is cosmopolitan.
Una district shares its boundaries with Hoshiarpur and Roop Nagar districts of Punjab in the South and with Kangra, Hamirpur and Bilaspur districts from North-West to North-East. The weather during the year swings to extremes with mercury soaring to 45 degrees Celsius during the summers and plummeting to minus 2 to 3 degrees during the winters. The fragile sandy soil of the lower Shivaliks makes monsoons the toughest season due to soil erosion and flash floods. The district is bounded by Solasingi Dhaar and the lower Shivalik ranges that run from the direction of North-West to South-East.
Post-independence history
While Himachal Pradesh came into existence on April 15, 1948, as a Chief Commissioner’s Province and became a Union Territory on November 1, 1956, it took another 10 years for the people of Una to be a part of the hill state. Most part of what is now Una district was one of the four tehsils of Hoshiarpur district of Punjab. According to the 1961 Census data pertaining to Una tehsil, only 27.4 per cent of the rural and 33.9 per cent of the urban population was Punjabi-speaking while the rest were Hindi-speaking.
Consequently in November 1966, as a result of the Reorganisation of Punjab State, Una tehsil was transferred to Himachal Pradesh on the basis of its geography and the predominant Hindi dialect of the local people. Una found its new place on the map of Himachal Pradesh as a Civil Sub-Division of Kangra district. On September 1, 1972, the Dhundla development block, then a part of Hamirpur sub-division, was included in Una sub-division and in the reshuffle, two new districts, namely Una and Hamirpur, was born on that day.
Strong roots of Sikhism
Anandpur Sahib, the home of the last two Sikh Gurus and witness to the birth of the Khalsa Panth is just about 42 km from Una and during the 17th and 18th century AD, the Una region, too, had a strong presence of Sikh spiritual leaders who were also warriors. One such leader, Baba Kaladhari Bedi (demise 1738), a direct descendant of Guru Nanak Dev, lived in Una and was very close to Guru Gobind Singh. Baba Kaladhari is credited as the one who weaved and nurtured the social fabric in and around the now Una city. In 1801, it was Baba Kaladhari’s grand son, Baba Sahib Singh, who performed coronation of Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh as the Maharaja and, in return, the latter handed over the Jagir of Una into the hands of Baba Sahib Singh, whose descendents still live at the Quila Baba Bedi in Una city. Amarjot Bedi, a young descendant of the family, is presently the chairman of the Una Municipal Committee. A number of gurdwaras in the district are reminiscent of the valour and sacrifice of the Sikhs during the Mughal and British rules.
A valuable book on Una
For those seeking information on Una, there is a book, more treasured than any official Gazetteer. The 352-page book in Hindi, titled “Una Janpad — Ek Parichay,” was published by the district administration in 2011. The then Deputy Commissioner, KR Bharti, had led a massive exercise involving all sections of the society and collected authentic records to compile the book, which provides information on the history, traditional practices, art, artifacts, culture, language and developmental aspects of the district.
Admn and demography
Una district has four Civil Sub-Divisions with headquarters at Una, Bangana, Amb and Haroli. When Gagret, the newly announced sub-division gets functional, there will be five sub-divisions, each overlapping an Assembly segment. Una has 234 gram panchayats, five Nagar Panchyats at Mehatpur, Santoshgarh, Daultpur Chowk, Tahliwal and Gagret besides, a Municipal Committee in Una city. According to the 2011 Census data, Una district has a population of 5,21,173 which includes 2,57,481 females and 2,63,692 males, accounting for an overall sex ratio of 976 females as compared to 1,000 males. However, as per the Census data, it is the child sex ratio in the district which is alarming at 875 females to every 1,000 male children in the 0 to 6 year age group. With the lowest child-sex ratio in the state, Una also figures in the list of 100 districts of the country having the lowest child-sex ratios.
Religious places
The Mata Chintpurni temple is located in Una district, where the Chaitra and Asooz Navratra fairs attract devotees from all over the country. The famous shrine of Dera Baba Badbhag Singh is in Mairi village, where devotees come during the annual Hola Mohalla fair. Other shrines of prominence in the district are Dera Baba Rudra Nand in Nari village, Pir Nigaha in Basoli, Piplu temple in Bangana, Gidgida Sahib in Haroli and Brahmahuti temple on the banks of Satluj in Handola village besides Baba Garib Nath temple in Kolka village, which remains partly submerged for five months in a year in Gobind Sagar Lake. During fairs and festivals, religious tourism picks up, creating traffic chaos in the district, particularly in Una city, said former municipal councillor Nanvdeep Kashyap. There is a need for road bypasses so that the inter-state traffic does not need to pass through Una city, he opined.
Swan River civilisation
The monsoon-fed Swan River originates in the district and traverses the entire 55 km length in the district. As many as 74 tributaries that bring rainwater keep joining the main river before it enters Punjab where it meets the mighty Satluj near Ropar. According to Sanskrit scholar and Principal of Sanskrit College Dohgi Dr Bhakt Vatsalam, Swan River finds mention in the Vedas as Swastu, meaning one which ushers prosperity and also as River Sombhadra in Valmiki Ramayan. “Today, the river system teems with garbage as the residents conveniently dump their waste into the water channels,” rued Santoshgarh residents Ashwani Kumar and Rajan Chabba, demanding solid waste management systems at the panchayat level.
Political leadership
Una district has five Assembly segments. Kutlehar, Chintpurni and Gagret are represented by BJP MLAs while there are Congress MLAs in Haroli and Una. For the Congress, Haroli MLA Mukesh Agnihotri is now the Leader of the Congress Legslative Party, while the BJP’s recent stalwarts include state party president Satpal Singh Satti from Una and Rural Development Minister Virender Kanwar from Kutlehar. As Industries Minister during the previous Congress regime, Agnihotri had managed huge state and central funding to construct basic infrastructure for health, industries, education, drinking water, irrigation and roads in the Haroli segment. However, vacant posts in the health sector, non-utilisation of common facility centres in industrial areas and low student strength in government schools has made the infrastructure to appear as a waste of public funds. During the run-up to the recent Assembly elections, Satti was touted to be included as a senior Cabinet minister in the BJP government, but like the Chief Ministerial candidate, Prem Kumar Dhumal, he too failed to make it to the Vidhan Sabha. According to social activist Rajiv Bhanot of the Una Janhit Morcha, the crumbling government health sector is a big issue in Una, but people see some hope with the announcement of a Rs 320-crore satellite hospital of PGI, Chandigarh, and a Rs 32-crore mother and child health care centre at the district hospital, both to be funded by the Union Government.
The vast potential of tourism in Bangana Sub-Division in the form of water sports in Gobind Sagar Lake, the picturesque Solasinghi Forts, hang gliding and paragliding adventure sports from Solasinghi and Ramgarh dhar ranges still remains untapped, said Ajay Upadhyay, who works in the tourism sector.
Industries
While there have been two industries ministers from Una district in the past, the industrial scenario vis-a-vis investment and employment is still bleak. According to departmental sources, there are 2,775 micro and small besides 28 medium and large industries registered in the district with an investment of Rs 2,165 crore, but truly speaking, not half of them are functional. A new industrial area at Pandoga, sanctioned during the Congress regime, is still in infancy.
Birthplace of cooperatives
Panjawar village in Una district is believed to be the birthplace of the Cooperative movement in the country. It was on February 28, 1892, that Panjawar resident Thakur Hira Singh formed a cooperative to organise farmers to protect the agriculture land from floods caused by the Swan river. Subhadra Devi, who leads the Swan Women Federation, an umbrella organisation for about 10,000 women representing 616 Self-Help Groups in more than 70 panchayats of Una district, says theirs is the largest women cooperative in the state and has more than Rs 7 crore as group deposits in their account.
Food bowl of the state
Also called as the food bowl of the state, farmers of Una district cultivate about 53,000 hectares of land. Main crops include wheat, maize, paddy, mustard, potato and colocacia, while mango, papaya, lemon, jamun and kinnow are the major fruit varieties that grow here. While local farmers, mostly belonging to the Saini and the Chaudhary communities, cultivate seasonal vegetables, it is the vegetable cultivators from Uttar Pradesh who have been cultivating summer vegetables on about 10,000 hectares of riverbed area of the Swan river system for many generations. When the river goes almost dry, the migrant cultivators, locally called as ‘Rai’, make use of the traditional techniques of their forefathers to tap the sub-surface river water and cultivate summer fruits and vegetables. While the Una valley has the biggest underground water reserves in the state, only 40 per cent of the agriculture land is irrigated. “Farmers want more irrigation schemes,” said Bansi Lal, a farmer from Kotla Khurd village, adding that “lack of pump operators at three irrigation schemes in their village have rendered these schemes defunct for many years.”
Sportsmen with distinction
Una district has produced two hockey Olympians, one of them being Padma Shri Charanjeet Singh, the Captain of Indian hockey team which won the gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Hailing from Mairi village, the veteran now lives in Una city. The photographs of Deepak Thakur, another hockey Olympian, Asian Games Shooting gold medalist Mohinder Singh, India volleyball team captain Surjit Singh, international handball player Harsh Tripathi and international kabaddi player Rohit Bhardwaj, all from Una district, adorn the walls of the indoor stadium gallery in Una.
Education
The district boasts of 86.52 per cent literacy rate with 627 middle and elementary schools besides 179 high and senior secondary schools in the government sector. There are eight colleges and a private university in Una besides a government polytechnic and about a dozen ITIs. The state’s only education institute in the cooperative sector is in Badheda village, which runs a Nursing and a Law College. However, students from the district prefer to go to Chandigarh or Jalandhar to receive higher education.
Remembering martyrs
Una is a district from where a majority of the youth aspire to join the armed or paramilitary forces. Every village has about a dozen serving armed personnel. A war memorial to pay tributes to the 87 soldiers from Una district who made the supreme sacrifice during action was recently dedicated at the Una municipal park. The monument inspires us to join the forces and serve the nation, said Sunil, Rihan and Abhishek, who regularly come to the park to exercise and eagerly await the next Army recruitment rally.
