Okara District - Renala Khurd

Renala Khurd

Renala Khurd(Urdu: رینالاخورد) is a growing city of Okara District in the north east of the Punjab province of Pakistan. The city is the headquarters of Renala Khurd Tehsil - an administrative subdivision of the district. Its approximate height above sea level is about 570 feet (170 m). It is located at 30°52'60N 73°35'60E and is about 117 km from Lahore and 10 km from the district capital Okara city towards south-west of Lahore on national highway (GT Road) and on Lahore Karachi main railway line. Eastern time zone of Renala Khurd is UTC+5+6DT.

It is mainly known for a famous fruit products company Mitchell's Fruit Farms Limited. It has orchards of guava & citrus running b/w the lower bari doab canal and the Multan Road, for about 8 miles all the way up to Okara bypass. This region is also well known as a major producer of sugarcane & rice. These crops can be cultivated due to abundance of water supplied by the lower bari doab canal & smaller water channels.

At Renala Khurd, one may visit still opertaional, Renala Hydro Power Station, situated on Canal Loar-Bari-Doo-Aab. Its capacity is 1 MW. Sir Ganga Ram (1851–1927), a civil engineer and leading philanthropist of his time, established Renala Hydral Power Station in 1925. In 1873, after a brief Service in Punjab P.W.D, he devoted himself to practical farming. He obtained on lease from the government 50,000 acres (200 km2) of barren, unirrigated land in Montgomery District, and within three years converted that vast desert into smiling fields, irrigated by water lifted by a hydroelectric plant and running through a thousand miles of irrigation channels, all constructed at his own cost. This was the biggest private enterprise of the kind, unknown and unthought of in the country before. Sir Ganga Ram earned millions, most of which he gave to charity. In the words of Sir Malcolm Hailey, the Governor of Punjab at the time, "he won like a hero and gave like a Saint".

A part of Renala Khurd is naturally deprived of the underground sweet water. People in this part rely on canals as the main source of irrigation, as tube -wells, unlike other parts of the district, only pour out salty water which nothing but spoils the land.