Mansa

Mansa is a district in the Malwa region of southern Punjab. It was formed on 13 April 1992 out of Bathinda district (Mansa district website). It is roughly triangular, bounded by Bathinda on the north-west, Sangrur on the north-east and Haryana on the south; its tehsils are Mansa, Budhlada and Sardulgarh, and its blocks Mansa, Bhikhi, Budhlada, Sardulgarh and Jhunir. Wikipedia says the area was once part of the Phulkian Sikh dynasty's territory and that Sikhs were 77.75 per cent of its people at the 2011 census. The district calls itself the "Area of white gold" because it lies in Punjab's cotton belt.

Farm debt and suicides. A study by Punjab Agricultural University economists Sukhpal Singh, Manjeet Kaur and H. S. Kingra, published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2022, counted suicides door to door in six districts from 2000 to 2018. Sangrur had the most farmer suicides (2,506), followed by Mansa (2,098) and Bathinda (1,956). It found heavy debt, mostly from non-institutional lenders, behind 88 per cent of the cases. These are counts of deaths, not rates per head of population.

Key moments

• 13 April 1992: the district is formed.
• 29 May 2022: the singer Sidhu Moose Wala, from the village of Moosa in the district, was shot dead in a village of Mansa district a day after the state withdrew his security cover (Scroll, citing The Tribune).
• Tuesday 13 October 2026: the anti-drug activist Parvinder Singh Jhota was shot dead at a chemist's shop in Mansa, in an incident streamed on Facebook Live. On 16 October, at the protest site in Mansa, the acting Akal Takht Jathedar, Giani Kuldeep Singh Gargaj, called his death a martyrdom. He said the SGPC would pay the medical costs of those injured (The Tribune).

What it means today. Mansa is a cotton-belt district with a high count of farm-debt suicides, and in October 2026 the acting Jathedar of the Akal Takht went to a protest site there over the killing of an anti-drug activist.