Hoshiarpur runs on manufacturing. The district is home to International Tractors Limited (Sonalika Group), whose plant in the Chak Gurjran / Piplanwala industrial belt on Jalandhar Road is described as the world's largest single-location integrated tractor manufacturing facility, with an installed capacity of 3 lakh tractors a year. ICML, also part of the Sonalika Group, operates alongside it. Add in the Focal Point Industrial Area and the wider district, and you get 6,480 registered industrial units employing more than 31,000 workers — including 24 large and medium-scale industries employing around 15,000 people.
But Hoshiarpur's industrial identity goes well beyond tractors. The district's wooden and bone inlay handicraft makers — organised in part through the Wooden Inlay Cluster and the MSME-backed Wooden Inlay Cluster Society, which has trained more than 160 artisans since 2019 — produce furniture and decorative pieces for export, alongside exporters like Hindustan Export Syndicate and New Matharu Arts. Sports goods manufacturers turn out cricket bats, balls and protective equipment. Sewing thread manufacturing and a dense layer of auto and tractor-parts ancillary units round out the industrial base, while mango cultivation and horticulture anchor the agricultural side of the district.
Running any of these businesses in Hoshiarpur comes with its own set of realities. A large share of the district's registered industrial units are small, workshop-style operations — repair shops, welding units, motor binding, packaging, ice factories — still keeping records on paper rather than in any digital system. Frequent, unscheduled power cuts have disrupted production badly enough to bring manufacturers out in protest over the irregular electricity supply. And export-oriented inlay and sports goods makers still lean on third-party portals like IndiaMART, TradeIndia and ExportersIndia to reach buyers, rather than owned systems of their own.
Plenty of Hoshiarpur businesses also serve customers who aren't in Hoshiarpur at all — real estate firms, travel agencies and forex or remittance services built around an NRI and diaspora clientele in Canada, the US and the UK, who need remote-friendly tools that work across time zones, not just in-person counters. Add historically patchy road connectivity that has kept transport and logistics costs high, and it's clear this district needs software built for how it actually operates, not a generic template.