Coimbatore

Coimbatore earned the title 'Manchester of South India' not by copying Manchester but by doing what Manchester did: converting a regional agricultural advantage into an industrial cluster. The Western Ghats channel monsoon moisture into the Kongu Nadu region, producing the cotton that feeds Coimbatore's textile mills. Hydroelectric power from the Pykara and Moyar rivers provided cheap energy before the national grid existed. By the mid-20th century, Coimbatore had become India's second-largest producer of cotton textiles after Mumbai.

The city then did something few Indian textile cities managed: it diversified. Coimbatore is India's largest manufacturer of wet grinders (a kitchen appliance essential in South Indian cooking) and a major producer of automobile components, pumps, and electric motors. The pump and motor industry alone claims over 50% of India's market share for fractional horsepower motors. This diversification—from textiles to engineering goods to IT services—created multiple economic pillars rather than the single-industry vulnerability that doomed other Indian mill towns.

Coimbatore's entrepreneurial culture is distinctive. The Kongu Nadu region's Gounder community has a reputation for business acumen and reinvestment that parallels the Marwari and Gujarati trading communities of North India. Small and medium enterprises dominate, creating a distributed economic ecosystem rather than one dependent on a few large firms. The city's engineering colleges—including PSG College of Technology and the Coimbatore Institute of Technology—produce the technical workforce that feeds local industry.

The city's evolution from cotton mills to precision engineering illustrates how industrial ecosystems can undergo succession without collapse—each new industry layer building on the skills, infrastructure, and entrepreneurial culture created by the previous one.