Industries of Madhya Pradesh: Pithampur, Cement and Mills

Madhya Pradesh is a mineral and farm state first, but a belt of industrial towns has grown along its railways and its cheap power. Questions from this topic are almost always of one kind: match the factory with the town and the town with the district. The list below is the one every state paper draws from, and the names repeat in SSC and railway papers as well.

The industrial regions of the state

Five clusters carry most of the state's factories. The Malwa belt around Indore, Dewas, Pithampur, Ujjain and Nagda is the largest, helped by the Mumbai-Delhi rail and road axis. The Bhopal belt holds the public sector plant at Govindpura and the private units at Mandideep in Raisen district. The Jabalpur belt adds the defence factories and, further east, the cement plants of Katni, Satna and Damoh. The Gwalior-Chambal belt has Malanpur in Bhind and Banmore in Morena. The eastern belt around Singrauli, Amlai and Shahdol runs on coal, with thermal power, aluminium and paper.

Public sector and defence factories

The heavy electrical equipment plant of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited at Govindpura in Bhopal is the oldest large industrial unit of the state; it was set up in the 1950s as Heavy Electricals India Limited with British collaboration and makes transformers, traction equipment and switchgear. Nepanagar in Burhanpur district has the newsprint mill of Nepa Limited, the first newsprint factory in the country, built in the years around independence. Currency work is divided between two towns: the Security Paper Mill at Hoshangabad, now Narmadapuram, makes bank note and stamp paper, and the Bank Note Press at Dewas prints notes; both belong to the Security Printing and Minting Corporation of India. Jabalpur is the defence town, with the Gun Carriage Factory, the Vehicle Factory, the Ordnance Factory at Khamaria and the Grey Iron Foundry. National Fertilizers Limited runs a gas-based urea plant at Vijaipur in Guna district, and the Government Opium and Alkaloid Works at Neemuch is one of only two such plants in India.

Pithampur, the automobile hub

Pithampur in Dhar district, about thirty kilometres from Indore, is called the Detroit of India for its vehicle and auto component plants. It grew as a planned industrial area with a dry port, an inland container depot and a special economic zone, and it anchors the Pithampur-Dhar-Mhow investment region, the node of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor that falls in this state. The National Automotive Test Tracks, NATRAX, built at Pithampur, has the longest high-speed test track in Asia and tests vehicles for speed, braking and handling.

Mineral based and chemical industries

Satna district is the cement capital of Madhya Pradesh because the Vindhyan rocks there give pure limestone, and plants also work at Katni, Damoh, Neemuch and Maihar. Amlai in Shahdol district has the Orient Paper Mill, which uses bamboo and eucalyptus from the eastern forests. The oil refinery at Bina in Sagar district, commissioned in 2011, takes crude through a pipeline from the Gujarat coast. Nagda in Ujjain district, known as Birlagram, has the Grasim plant that makes viscose staple fibre, rayon grade pulp and caustic soda, and Ratlam has a long-established chemical and pharmaceutical unit.

Textile and agro based industries

Cotton textiles once made Indore the Mini Mumbai of central India and Gwalior had the mills of Birla Nagar; most old composite mills have closed, and the work has moved to power looms at Burhanpur, Indore and Ujjain and to the handloom clusters of Chanderi and Maheshwar. Agro processing is now the fastest-growing side of industry: Madhya Pradesh leads the country in soybean, so solvent extraction and oil plants fill the Indore, Dewas and Ujjain belt, and the state also processes gram, wheat, cotton and oranges. Food parks, warehousing and cold chains have been added around Indore, Jabalpur and Gwalior.

Industrial areas to remember

Who promotes industry in the state

The Madhya Pradesh Industrial Development Corporation, which absorbed the older regional Audyogik Kendra Vikas Nigams, develops industrial areas, allots land and runs the single window system; the Khadi and Village Industries Board and the handloom and handicraft corporations look after the village and craft side, and the state's investor summits are held mainly at Indore. For the exam, keep three threads separate: the public sector plants and what each makes, the private industrial areas with their districts, and the agro and mineral base that explains why a factory stands where it does.