For decades, footballs, rugby balls, cricket bats, and hockey sticks stamped with names like Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Puma, Slazenger, and Webb Ellis were quietly manufactured not in Europe, but in Jalandhar, a mid-sized city in Punjab that rarely comes up in conversations about global sport.
At its peak, this single cluster supplied products to more than 130 countries.
Today, the story has grown more complicated, and understanding why is its own lesson in how manufacturing dominance can be built and then slowly lost.
A trade that migrated across a border
Jalandhar's sporting goods industry didn't originate there.
