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Pulgaon History: How Railways, Cotton and Ammunition Built the Town

Writer: Pranay Arya
Pranay Arya
Aug 16
9 min read
Pulgaon history in Wardha showing the railway, cotton trade and ammunition depot
Pulgaon grew from a railway-linked cotton town into one of Wardha district’s most historically significant centres

A crossing over the Wardha River in Vidarbha once had nothing beside it but a handful of huts, put up for the men working on a railway bridge.


Within a few decades, that same spot in Wardha district had grown into a municipality with a cotton mill, a regulated market and a population running into the thousands.


Pulgaon's shift from a labourers' camp to an industrial and military centre in Vidarbha is an unusual account of how a small railway settlement turned into a town of national importance.


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How the Railway Bridge Over the Wardha River Built Pulgaon


Pulgaon did not start as an established town that later gained a railway connection. The sequence worked the other way round.


A settlement formed beside the crossing built for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway over the Wardha River, and the men who built that bridge lived in huts near the site. The 1908 Imperial Gazetteer of India described the early settlement in exactly those terms and translated the name Pulgaon as bridge village. That description remains the clearest starting point for the town's recorded history.

The wider district was also going through administrative change around the same period. Wardha had been part of Nagpur district until 1862, when it was separated on account of the unwieldy size of Nagpur district and the growing importance of the cotton industry in the Wardha valley. The first headquarters of the new district was established at Kaotha, close to Pulgaon, though it stayed there only briefly. By 1866, the headquarters had shifted to the site where Wardha town now stands.


The railway itself reached this belt in 1867, when the Bombay to Nagpur line opened through the area. Once the bridge crossing became part of a working trunk line, the settlement around it had good reason to stay put. The railway carried more than passengers. It gave cotton grown around Wardha and Arvi a quicker route to the trading and manufacturing centres that mattered for the crop, a factor that would go on to define much of Pulgaon's economy in Vidarbha.


By 1901, Pulgaon's population stood at 4,710, and the settlement was formally constituted as a municipality that same year. Municipal receipts in 1903-04 came to around Rs 11,000 against expenditure of about Rs 7,000, with road tolls and rents from land forming the bulk of the income. These were modest figures, but they mark out a town that had, within a few decades of the bridge works, taken on the basic institutions of urban administration rather than remaining a construction camp.


The layout of the town also kept the imprint of how it began. The main settlement lay south of the railway line, according to the later Wardha District Gazetteer, so the rail line and river crossing sat at the centre of the town's plan rather than at its edge.


The line ran through a productive black-soil cotton belt, with Wardha to the east and the cotton-growing areas around Arvi to the north.


A second rail link strengthened this position further in 1917, when the Pulgaon-Arvi narrow-gauge line opened for traffic.

It ran for 21.83 miles, close to 35 kilometres, from Pulgaon northwards, with ten stations along the way including Sorta, Virul, Rohna, Rohna Town, Dhanori, Pargothan, Pachegaon, Khubgaon and Arvi.


Pulgaon served as the junction from which this branch began, and by the start of the twentieth century it was already receiving cotton from nearly the whole of the Arvi tahsil. The new line gave that trade a dedicated route into the main network.



Cotton Trade and the Rise of Pulgaon Cotton Mills in Wardha


Cotton turned Pulgaon from a railway settlement into a trading and manufacturing town. By the early twentieth century, five cotton-ginning factories and three pressing factories were operating in the town alongside a spinning mill, with a combined total of 146 gins and three presses.


Having ginning, pressing, spinning, and rail transport all within one location gave Pulgaon several stages of the cotton business in a single place, unusual for a town of its size in Vidarbha at the time.

Government gazetteers differ slightly on when the main textile mill began. The Maharashtra State Gazetteer places the establishment of a cotton textile mill in Pulgaon as early as 1889, while the earlier Imperial Gazetteer records that the Pulgaon Spinning Mills opened in 1892 with a capital of Rs 5 lakh and close to 15,000 spindles.


The gap between the two dates most likely separates when the enterprise was set up from when it began full operations, though the available material does not settle the point conclusively. What is clear is that the mill was operating at a substantial scale by 1892.


Growth after that was quick. A weaving department with 165 looms was added in 1902 at a further cost of roughly Rs 3.5 lakh, and by 1904 the mill had 17,000 spindles alongside its 165 looms.


That year, it produced about 29,000 maunds of thread worth Rs 10 lakh and 7,500 maunds of cloth worth nearly Rs 4 lakh, with an average workforce of close to 900.


The mill converted raw cotton into yarn and cloth on site, while the separate ginning and pressing units handled the earlier stages, so factory work sat alongside farming and rail freight within the same local economy.

Profits swung sharply from year to year. The mill recorded a profit of Rs 87,000 in 1903, but that fell to just Rs 9,000 in 1904, a difference that points to how exposed cotton manufacturing was to changing costs and trade conditions at the time.


The Regulated Cotton Market and the Mill's Closure


Pulgaon's cotton trade gained a formally regulated market in February 1937, positioned near the railway station in keeping with the town's dependence on rail freight, with a jurisdiction that extended over a radius of 14 miles.


A separate grain market followed much later, in January 1961. Bales processed in Pulgaon were sent by rail to Bombay, Madras, Kanpur and Ahmedabad, with the mill absorbing part of the crop and the ginning and pressing units preparing the rest for shipment. Trade was busiest between November and March.

By 1961, Pulgaon's population had reached 28,063, almost six times the 1901 figure of 4,710, and the cotton mill remained a major employer, with census material from that year putting its workforce at close to 2,000. Production in 1963-64 reached about 27.07 lakh kilograms of cotton yarn and 167.62 lakh metres of cotton cloth.


The mill's fortunes changed in the following decades. A 1982 Maharashtra law acquired most of the shares in Pulgaon Cotton Mills Limited, following an earlier central takeover of its management in 1976, and the acquisition provisions were deemed to have taken effect from 24 August 1982. Closure came two decades later.


A Bombay High Court judgment from 2004 records that closure permission for mills under the state textile corporation, including the one at Pulgaon, was granted on 10 January 2001. A voluntary retirement agreement was signed in November 2002 and registered later that month, and it was put into effect on 31 August 2003, when the Pulgaon mill shut for good with a workforce of 850 at that point.


The fall from close to 2,000 workers in 1961 to 850 at closure shows how much the industrial base had already contracted before the mill finally shut its gates.



The Central Ammunition Depot and Its Place in Vidarbha's History


Pulgaon took on a second identity during the Second World War. Its ammunition establishment dates to 1942, when it was set up as a logistics centre supporting military operations across Southeast Asia.


This placed a major explosives storage facility in a town that already had, by that point, close to three-quarters of a century of experience as a railway junction, with a trunk connection towards Bombay and Nagpur and the branch line to Arvi that had opened in 1917.

After independence, the depot kept growing in importance. The Maharashtra State Gazetteer later described Pulgaon as having gained military significance because of its size, and the Central Ammunition Depot came to function as the central, or mother, depot within the Army's ammunition system. It receives ammunition and explosives from production units and overseas suppliers and sends stocks onward to field depots elsewhere.


Its grounds cover roughly 7,100 acres, well beyond the 1,000 to 2,000 acres typical of many other major ammunition depots in the country, giving Pulgaon a scale of national logistical importance unusual for a town whose earliest recorded residents were bridge labourers living in huts, and one that placed it firmly on the strategic map of Vidarbha.


The depot's history has also included serious accidents. On 31 May 2016, about 130 tonnes of anti-tank mines exploded during a major fire, killing 19 people. The dead included two officers, four Defence Security Corps personnel and 13 fire-fighting staff, and the scale of the loss drew national attention to a facility that had been part of Pulgaon since the Second World War.


A second explosion took place on 20 November 2018 at a fenced demolition and destruction site near the depot, where unserviceable ammunition brought in from an ordnance factory for controlled destruction went off while it was being unloaded. Six people were killed, and at least ten were injured in that incident, which involved a different location and a different activity from the 2016 fire.


The closure of the cotton mill in 2003 removed an institution that had been part of Pulgaon for more than a hundred years, while the ammunition depot has continued in its original role.


What stands out is how closely the town's two main identities, one built on cotton and rail, the other on wartime logistics, both trace back to the same advantage of a location beside a river crossing that once held nothing more than a handful of huts.


FAQs


Q: Origin of the Pulgaon name and its railway bridge history

A: Pulgaon grew out of a settlement of huts built for labourers working on a railway bridge over the Wardha River, and the 1908 Imperial Gazetteer translated the name as bridge village. By 1901, it had a population of 4,710 and had been constituted as a municipality.


Q: Closure date of Pulgaon Cotton Mills in Wardha district

A: Pulgaon Cotton Mills, operating on a substantial scale since 1892, permanently closed on 31 August 2003, following a closure process that began with government permission in January 2001 and a voluntary retirement agreement in November 2002.


Q: Details of the 2016 explosion at the Central Ammunition Depot in Pulgaon

A: On 31 May 2016, a major fire at the Central Ammunition Depot set off about 130 tonnes of anti-tank mines, killing 19 people, including two officers, four Defence Security Corps personnel and 13 fire-fighting staff.


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About the Author

Pranay Arya is the founder and editor of The News Dirt, an independent journalism platform focused on ground-level reporting across Vidarbha. He has authored 800+ research-based articles covering public issues, regional history, infrastructure, governance, and socio-economic developments, building one of the region’s most extensive digital knowledge archives.

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