Rohtak: Haryana’s new education, industrial hub

A wall of Shri Kishan Khator’s office is filled with framed newspaper clippings. The theme of all these news articles is the same — Rohtak being one of the country’s biggest producers of C-parts ( crews, nuts, bolts) for the automobile industry.

One of the articles describes Rohtak as being the ‘king of the automobile parts industry’. Khator, the president of the IDC Industries Association, Rohtak, tells you this is no exaggeration.

“The city has over 2,000 units making automobile fasteners, with an estimated annual turnover of ₹1,300 crore. We supply these parts to automobile manufacturers in Gurugram, Manesar, and Chennai,” he says.

Rohtak, one of Haryana’s fastest-growing cities, has emerged as an education and industrial hub over the past decade. Located a mere 80 km from Connaught Place, real estate in the city is booming like never before, with several new townships being developed along the highways on the outskirts of the city.

“Real estate prices have risen from ₹15,000 per square yard in 2018 to ₹60,000 per square yard at present in townships like Sun City,” says Manoj Bahal, a property dealer. The Sun City, one of the most sought-after townships, boasts of wide tree-lined roads, hospitals and shopping complexes

The property boom has led to some real estate agents making the jump to becoming developers. Raveen Siwach, who worked as a property dealer for more than a decade, set up Palm Abodes Buildcon, a real estate company, and launched his first project Florence Town, a 9-acre gated plotted colony, in March.

“I travel a lot and decided to call my first township Florence Town after my visit to the Italian city, which I fell in love with. My township will not just have an Italian name but will be developed like one. Its gates, the lights and parks will all have an authentic Italian feel,” says Siwach, adding that his project was sold out within a month.

Siwach is already planning his second project, which he has tentatively christened ‘Irish Garden’.

Bhupeshwar Dayal, the officer on special duty (OSD) to Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, says the state government has undertaken several road infrastructure projects to boost connectivity to the city.

“The government is currently building a network of roads that will connect Rohtak to Meerut, Indira Gandhi International airport in Delhi, Gurugram, and the Delhi Mumbai Expressway. The new Trans–Haryana Expressway (NH-152D), which was inaugurated last year, has reduced the travel time between Rohtak and Chandigarh from 4 hours to around 2.5 hours. The area around this Expressway is being developed as an industrial corridor,” Dayal says.

Attracting big-ticket investment

Just like neighbouring Sonepat was once known for its now-shut Atlas Cycle Factory, Rohtak’s rise as a hub of the automobile parts industry can be traced to Laxmi Precision Screws (LPS) Limited.

Founded in 1968 by Bimal Prasad Jain, a local businessman, the company produced automotive and industrial fasteners, supplying to major automobile manufacturers in India such as Hero Honda and Maruti Suzuki, and exporting its products to countries such as the US, the UK and Australia, among others.

The company’s three plants in the city are now shut.

“The LPS success spawned a whole C-parts industry in the city in the 1970s,” says Khator. Today, a majority of the 447 factories in Rohtak’s two industrial areas managed by the Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation (HSIIDC) produce automobile parts.

Rohtak has also attracted some big-ticket investments in its Industrial Model Township (IMT) — a sprawling 3,700 acre industrial-cum-residential estate developed by HSIIDC. This township boasts of manufacturing units of more than two dozen big companies, including Asian Paints, Amul, Nippon Carbide India and Lotte India Corporation, among others. The showpiece of the IMT is Maruti’s 600-acre research and development centre.

“We have allotted more than 200 plots, most of them in the past two years alone. These include a bottling plant, and a footwear cluster, among others. What makes IMT such a sought-after destination is its connectivity, with highways on all sides,” says Kuldeep Kadian, estate manager of IMT Rohtak.

However, it has not been all plain sailing for the city.

In February 2016, Rohtak, known as the political capital of Haryana, saw a violent agitation by the Jat community, who demanded inclusion in the OBC category to get reservations in jobs and educational institutions. The city quickly descended into a war zone, with protesters setting dozens of buildings —hotels, schools, police stations — on fire, and ransacking and looting showrooms and other commercial establishments.

Despite the imposition of curfew, the deployment of the Army, and shoot-on-sight orders, complete anarchy and mayhem prevailed in the city for over a month.

An HSIIDC official, who declined to be named, said, “Many companies who had agreed to invest here backed out after the Jat agitation, damaging the city’s reputation as an investment destination.”

Although Jats are the majority community in Rohtak, the city has a sizable population of Punjabis, Banias, Sainis, Brahmins and Yadavs. “The politically motivated agitation led to social tensions that continue to prevail until today,” says Khajan Singh Sangwan, the former dean of the faculty of social sciences at Rohtak’s Maharshi Dayanand University.

An education hub

Rohtak has always had a healthy caste competition, exemplified by its many caste-based educational societies such as the Vaish Education Society, Jat Education Society, Gaur Braham Vidya Pracharini Sabha, Saini Education Society, and Hindu Educational Society, among others.

Signboards of these societies, which run dozens of schools, colleges, and engineering colleges, are hung over the bustling city roads.

“Most of our institutes are self-financed, but members of the society do make financial contributions if required. Students of all castes study in these institutes,” says Rajindra Bansal, secretary of the Vaish Education Society, which has 12 educational institutes in the city, including schools, an engineering college, a law college and a pharmacy college, with over 15, 000 students. “Rohtak is one of the oldest education hubs in Haryana.”

“These educational societies were set up by prominent social and political leaders of these communities out of a desire to serve their people, and as a symbol of their social standing. All castes here have been united by their desire to educate their children, and their institutes have had children of all castes,” says Sangwan.

Some such figures include Chotu Ram, Matu Ram Hooda, Lal Chand Phogat, and Shyam Lal Jain.

Another reason why some of these communities pushed their children towards education was because the British Indian Army recruited many personnel from Rohtak during World War 1 and 2, and the British would prefer educated men as soldiers, says Sangwan.

“Compared to the rest of Haryana, Rohtak has been a progressive city because of its proximity to the Capital. Even in villages, the Khaps no longer issue diktats over what women can or cannot wear. Inter-caste and inter-religious marriages are now common. My younger son is married to a Muslim woman from Kashmir, and our family faced no opposition from people in my village,” says Sangwan, who belongs to the Jat community.

Rohtak’s reputation as an education hub was further cemented with the arrival in 2014 of the Indian Institute of Management, Rohtak (IIM-Rohtak) and the State University of Performing and Visual Arts (SUPVA) — one of the country’s largest public universities to offer courses in design, visual arts, film and television, and planning and architecture.

The city is also home to the Post Graduate Institute Of Medical Sciences (PGIMS), Maharshi Dayanand University (MDU), and several private engineering colleges.

“The growing number of varied education institutes has changed the aspirations of local youngsters. Earlier, a lot of them wanted to get into sports and the armed forces, but now a lot of them are getting into IT and other fields,” says Pardeep Narwal, who runs New Edge Soft Sol, 2016, a block-chain start-up in Rohtak.

New challenges

Rohtak was once referred to as the gangster capital of Haryana, and bloody, hard-fought rivalries were common.

Several of the district’s sportspeople have also taken to a life of crime. One prominent example from the recent past is Rakesh Mokhariya, a national-level gold medallist in wrestling who was arrested in 2018 on charges of murder.

“The entire belt of Rohtak, Sonipat, Jhajjar and Bhiwani has historically been home to gangsters. But the problem is not as acute as it was a couple of decades ago. Sportspersons are taking to crime due to their falling into the wrong company. We are now working with the youth under the Centre’s Students Police Cadet Programme, which offers various kinds of training to inculcate a sense of discipline, values and ethics in them,” says Himanshu Garg, superintendent of police, Rohtak.

Rohtak’s gangster problem may have been quelled, but police are now faced with a new challenge — a rising number of people have started abusing narcotics.

Data from the State Drug Dependence Treatment Centre (SDDTC) in Rohtak shows that the number of opioid-dependent patients registered at the centre rose fourfold over the past six years, from 1,261 in 2017 to 5,613 by the end of 2022.

Other such centres in the city have seen a similar spike in patients.

Latesh Nagar, a counsellor at the city’s Red Cross De-addiction and Rehabilitation Centre, says, “Most of those who are admitted here are youngsters from all strata of society, and their numbers have been rising. In the past month, I have treated 10 of them, most are addicted to opium and smack. They told me a lot of drug peddlers are girls.”

SP Garg admits that drug abuse is a problem in Rohtak, but adds, “We have launched a big crackdown on drug peddlers, recently arresting a major drug supplier… We are strictly enforcing the provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, and Prevention of Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (PIT-NDPS) Act, and are even attaching the properties of the peddlers, something that has not happened before in Rohtak.”

The city’s new social hotspot

D-Park in Rohtak’s Model Town area is the city’s social hotspot, with many trendy cafes, bakeries, boutiques and salons coming up over the last few years.

It is evening and the Olive Bistro, one of the many new cafes, is packed with youngsters. Its founder Rachna Bhatia, who has studied fashion design in Italy, says that when she started this European-style café, she was not sure it would work in a city like Rohtak. “Today, we are short of space and need to expand. Many of our patrons are students, especially from IIM and PGIMS. There are also many affluent local residents who would earlier travel to Delhi to eat out,” says Bhatia.

Another such eatery is Anurag’s Café & Live Bakery. “Our customers include local residents and many students from Mumbai, Chennai and Ahmedabad studying in Rohtak,” says Akshu (she uses one name), who runs the cafe with her husband, a well-known chef in the city. “But you would be surprised to know that a lot of our customers are from the neighbouring villages, who have such a fine taste for different cakes.”

Pardeep Narwal says that the city has a great future and he never wishes to leave it. “It has all the attractions of a lively city: cafes, multiplexes, great townships, and is multicultural with its national-level educational institutes. With growing investment, the jobs are growing too; it is a city with opportunities.”