Doaba Headlines: Nakodar's Punjabi Newspaper, Founded by Ram Singh Aulakh in 2002
Doaba Headlines is a Punjabi-language newspaper published from Nakodar, a historic town in the Jalandhar district of Punjab. It was started on 26 May 2002, and its founder, Ram Singh Aulakh, remains identified in published listings as its editor-in-chief. The paper takes its name from Doaba — also called Bist Doab or the Jalandhar Doab — the fertile region of Punjab between the Beas and Sutlej rivers, and it serves the towns and villages of that region from a base on Nakodar's Bypass Road. In a state dominated by large Punjabi dailies published from Chandigarh, Ludhiana and Jalandhar, Doaba Headlines represents the other tradition of Punjabi journalism: the small-town paper, edited from within the community it covers, whose archive of issues through the 2010s documents more than a decade of continuous publication.
Founding on 26 May 2002
Reference listings for Punjabi-language newspapers give Doaba Headlines a precise starting date — 26 May 2002 — and a precise birthplace: Nakodar. They also name its founder directly. Ram Singh Aulakh started the paper and has continued as its editor-in-chief, a continuity of editorship that is itself part of the paper's identity. Small-town newspapers in Punjab are commonly proprietor-edited ventures, and Doaba Headlines fits that model: one founder-editor whose name appears on the paper's digital editions year after year. Listings of the paper's issues on the Readwhere digital newsstand, which carried the title for years, credit Ram Singh Aulakh as the publisher of each issue and name Naresh Singh as sub-editor — a small, named editorial team of the kind that produces most of India's local-language press.
Nakodar: An Old Town in the Heart of Doaba
Nakodar is a fitting base for a regional paper. It is a town of considerable antiquity in Jalandhar district, standing at about 31.13 degrees north and 75.47 degrees east, at an average elevation of 223 metres, on the Moga–Jalandhar section of National Highway 703. Historical accounts describe a town founded by the Hindu Kamboh, held in succession by different communities and rulers: it passed to Muslim Rajput holders under a jagir from the Emperor Jahangir, was taken in the Sikh period by Sardar Tara Singh, who built a fort there, and was seized by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1816, after which it served for a time as a cantonment under the British. Its old tombs and ruins still mark that layered past, and its official master plan counts numerous mosques, temples and gurdwaras within the town. Today Nakodar is a tehsil town surrounded by the villages of the central Doaba plain — exactly the constituency, town plus its village hinterland, that a paper called Doaba Headlines sets out to serve.
The Doaba Region the Paper Is Named For
The name Doaba comes from the Persian words for two waters, describing land between two rivers. The region lies between the Beas and the Sutlej: the Sutlej separates it from Malwa to the south, and the Beas separates it from Majha to the north. It comprises the districts of Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala, Jalandhar and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar, and its people are called Doabias; the local dialect of Punjabi is Doabi. Doaba is also known as Punjab's NRI heartland — a very large share of its families have members settled in North America, Europe and the Middle East, and remittances and diaspora news are part of everyday life. Scheduled castes form more than forty per cent of the region's population, giving its politics and society a distinctive character within Punjab. A newspaper that puts Doaba in its title is making a clear regional claim: its first loyalty is to this in-between land and its people, at home and abroad, rather than to the state capital or to any single city.
A Punjabi-Language Paper from a Small Town
Doaba Headlines publishes in Punjabi, the language of its readers' homes, farms, schools and local government. Punjab's newspaper market is led by big Punjabi dailies with multi-city editions, but the state's press ecology has always included smaller titles rooted in individual towns, and reference lists of Punjabi newspapers place Doaba Headlines in that company — alongside town-based papers from places such as Bagha Purana, Dharam Singh Market in Amritsar and Baghapurana, and Patiala's titles. The small-town Punjabi paper does work the big editions cannot easily do: it can name the villages, schools, panchayats, religious congregations and local traders of its own tehsil, and report disputes, celebrations and achievements at a scale that a district edition would edit out. Doaba Headlines' base in Nakodar, rather than in Jalandhar city a short distance away, is the practical expression of that localism.
The Paper's Editorial Team and Office
Published listings give Doaba Headlines an unusually human paper trail for a small title. Its Readwhere publisher pages state that the newspaper is published from Nakodar, District Jalandhar, Punjab 144040, name Ram Singh Aulakh as chief editor and Naresh Singh as sub-editor. Business directories locate Doaba Headlines on Bypass Road in Nakodar, listing it as both a newspaper publisher and an advertising agency — the dual activity typical of small Indian papers, which sell local advertising directly to the traders and institutions of their town. The paper's presence in such directories, with ratings from local users, confirms it as a working commercial office in the town, not merely a registered title. For readers and advertisers in Nakodar, the editor is not a distant figure in a metro head office but a named person in a known office on a known road.
Publication in Print and on the Digital Newsstand
Doaba Headlines reached digital readers through Readwhere, the Indian digital newsstand platform, where its issues were offered for reading on mobile phones and tablets. The platform's archive preserves a long run of the paper: individual issues can be traced from at least January 2013 through January, February, March and April 2020, including issues from 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 — evidence of sustained publication across most of a decade, under the same publisher's name. Readwhere catalogued the title among its newspaper offerings in the Punjabi language. One caution belongs in any honest profile: the platform described its listing with a weekly periodicity in some issue records, while the paper is generally described as a newspaper from Nakodar without a settled frequency in other listings; readers researching the title should treat its exact print frequency in those years as not firmly established by public records. What the archive does establish beyond doubt is longevity and regularity under a single editor.
What a Paper Like This Covers
No detailed content audit of Doaba Headlines survives in public sources, and its profile should not pretend otherwise. What can be said from its title, language and base is the beat it was created to work: news of Nakodar and the Doaba region in Punjabi — the municipal and panchayat affairs of the town and surrounding villages, the agricultural life of one of Punjab's most fertile tracts, the schools, colleges and religious institutions of the area, and the doings of a far-flung Doabi diaspora whose families remain rooted in these villages. The general listings that include the paper place it straightforwardly among Punjab's news publications serving Punjabi readers in India. In a region where out-migration is a central fact of life, a local paper in the home language also performs a connecting function, giving emigrant families a printed account of home.
Doaba Headlines and Punjab's Small-Paper Tradition
Punjabi journalism is often described through its giants, but its depth comes from titles like Doaba Headlines. Punjab's districts support a layered press: state-level dailies, city editions, and a base layer of town papers that record local life at its true scale. The founder-edited town paper is vulnerable — it depends on one person's energy and on a small advertising market — yet Doaba Headlines' traceable run from 2002 through at least 2020 shows the model working for nearly two decades. Its survival also illustrates why such papers matter to media diversity in Punjab: a reader in a village near Nakodar is more likely to see her own community in a Nakodar paper than in any edition printed in Chandigarh or Ludhiana.
Doaba Headlines Today
Doaba Headlines' documented record — founded at Nakodar on 26 May 2002 by Ram Singh Aulakh, who continued as editor-in-chief, staffed with a named sub-editor, published in Punjabi from Bypass Road, Nakodar, and preserved in a digital newsstand archive spanning 2013 to 2020 — makes it a clear example of Punjab's small-town press at work. Later public listings are sparse, and this profile makes no claim about editions beyond those records. What remains firmly established is the paper's place in the media history of Doaba: for the better part of two decades, the region between the Beas and the Sutlej had a newspaper of its own, named for the region itself, and edited from one of its oldest towns.
