Economy

Power on the river, cane on the plain

Kot Addu’s national name is energy and sugar. The same canals that water mango and citrus also feed the mills.

The city is a commercial hinge of southern Punjab: rail, road, thermal plants, a refinery at Mehmood Kot, and a bazaar that still runs on ginning, flour, oil, and farm trade.

Agriculture Industry

Land

Land that lives by water.

The river feeds the canals. The canals feed the fields. The fields feed the city.

Roughly half the old tehsil acreage is cultivated. After repeated floods, cane has taken more of the map; growers sell to mills or make gur.

Indus irrigation

Canals

Muzaffar Canal
TP Link Canal

Seasonal

Field crops

wheat
cotton
rice
sugarcane
tobacco
mustard
sunflower

Perennial

Orchards

mango
citrus
guava
pomegranate
ber (local berry)

Fatima Sugar Mill processing plant, Kot Addu area — Fatima Sugar Mill, Kot Addu District

Sheikhoo Sugar Mill — cane unloading yard and processing plant — Sheikhoo Sugar Mill, Kot Addu District

Industry

The energy corridor

Kot Addu Power Company thermal plant on the Indus left bank — KAPCO plant, Kot Addu District

Lalpir Thermal Power Station — stacks and switchyard near Mehmood Kot — Lalpir Power Plant, Kot Addu District

PARCO Mid-Country Refinery at Mehmood Kot — tanks and lit towers at twilight — PARCO Mid-Country Refinery, Kot Addu District

Power · Left bank of the Indus, about 16 km from Taunsa Barrage

KAPCO

Kot Addu Power Company runs a thermal plant built by WAPDA in five phases between 1985 and 1996, then privatised in 1996 and listed in 2005. Gas turbines, exhaust stacks, and a riverside switchyard — the plant that put this stretch of the Indus on the national grid.

Power · Near Mehmood Kot / Kot Addu energy belt

Lalpir

Lalpir Thermal Power Station — red-and-white stacks, boilers, and a switchyard beside the Mehmood Kot rail line. With KAPCO and PARCO, it is part of the Indus-side corridor that feeds Punjab’s grid and employs much of the district’s industrial workforce.

Oil · Mehmood Kot (district — not the city bazaar)

PARCO Mid-Country Refinery

Pak-Arab Refinery’s Mid-Country Refinery at Mehmood Kot — storage tanks, distillation columns, and the red-and-white flare stack that marks the plant from the road. A national fuels hub on the district map, a short drive from Kot Addu city rather than a downtown landmark.

Agro-industry · Kot Addu area

Sheikhoo Sugar Mill

A major buyer of local cane — unloading gantries, harvest trucks in the yard, and a chimney stack that marks crushing season. The complex has grown with rooftop solar; silos and processing halls sit behind the same gates that take in the district’s ganna.

Agro-industry · Kot Addu area

Fatima Sugar Mill

One of the large mills in the cane belt — evaporation towers, storage tanks, and crushing lines that turn district harvest into sugar. Flood years have pushed more fields into cane; mills like Fatima are the other half of the plain’s economy beside the power plants.

Cottage work still matters: cotton ginning, flour and oil mills, and Kundra (kundan-style) embroidery and metal craft. The energy plants get the headlines; the bazaar still runs on mills, workshops, and farm trade.