Here to serve, in Punjab.

The farm year sets the clock for much of the security work in Punjab. Grain markets and procurement yards at Sangrur, Dhuri and Sunam fill and empty on a procurement calendar, Tarn Taran and Patti take heavy paddy arrivals into sheller godowns, and Abohar's kinnow packhouses and cold stores run hard from December to March. Cotton ginning yards in Mansa and Sri Muktsar Sahib and the cotton mandis of Bathinda, and sugar mills through the crushing season in Gurdaspur and Shahid Bhagat Singh Nagar, add their own peaks.

Industry comes in two forms. Ludhiana's hosiery, bicycle and fastener units and Jalandhar's sports-goods and leather sheds mean many premises rather than a few campuses, while Mandi Gobindgarh's re-rolling mills and induction furnaces run continuous shifts with scrap coming in and finished steel going out across the weighbridge. Larger sites sit in Bathinda's refinery and petrochemical complex, Rupnagar's thermal station and fertiliser unit, and the IT campuses and pharmaceutical units of Mohali, Dera Bassi and Lalru, each with contractor gates and night shifts.

Then there are the crowds. Footfall around Harmandir Sahib and Amritsar's walled-city bazaars, Hola Mohalla at Anandpur Sahib, the Jor Mela at Fatehgarh Sahib each December and the Maghi Mela at Muktsar each January all put very large temporary crowds into compact towns. Along the border in Firozpur, Fazilka and Gurdaspur, sites are far apart, approaches are controlled and night cover is the hard part, and Pathankot's hill edge adds slow relief movement, so supervision and relief are planned for distance. In the Doaba, NRI-owned houses in Hoshiarpur and Shahid Bhagat Singh Nagar stand empty for long stretches and need watching.