page_title: Katol
section_title: Economy
hierarchical_section_title: Katol / Economy
context_page_description: Katol is a city and a municipal council in Nagpur district of Maharashtra state, India. It is the administrative headquarters of Katol taluka, one of the 14 talukas of this district. Being located in orange belt it is a major centre for orange trading.
context_section_description: The weekly market of Katol has long been important and is now attended by from 6000 to 8000 people. Commodities of all kinds are dealt in but the bazar is more especially important as being the second largest cattle - market in the town. In the month of Ashvin (October) the Saraswati fair (Navaratra) is held and is usually attended by about 20,000 people a day. The orchards of the town are, noted for their growth of fine & world-famous oranges.
  But cotton is the staple of Katol trade. In the year 1905-06 26,723 carts of raw uncleaned cotton were sold in the market, and that number is liable to be exceeded in years of heavy harvest, for the town draws produce from the rich valleys of the Jam and Wardha rivers and from many villages of the Amravati and Wardha Districts. There are now four ginning factories at work, and three of these have presses also. They are fitted with 216 gins, which in 1905-06 turned out 32,000 bales (or 512,000 maunds) of cleaned cotton.
  The Katol tahsil has a total area of 800 square miles (2,100 km²), of which 56 are comprised in Government forest.
  Katol has, on the whole, the poorest soils of the four tahsils as regards composition, although it has all the kali soils of the first class in the District . The percentages of the various soils are 2 for kali, 55.9 for morand, 28.5 for khardi and 13.2; for bardi. Nevertheless, from an agricultural point of view Katol is the most advanced of the four tahsils, and its lands produce kharif crops as valuable as the wheat of the other tahsils. The cultivators are intelligent and enterprising to an unusual degree and spend much time and money on improvements to their fields. Of the 17,000 acres (69 km²) of irrigated garden land at settlement 8,000 acres (32 km²) were in Katol. Of the total area of 476,000 acres (1,930 km²) at settlement, 358,000 were occupied and 332,000 were in cultivation. The actual area cropped has risen since the thirty years' settlement from 265,000 acres (1,070 km²) to 337,000 acres (1,360 km²) in 1906–07, an increase of 29 percent, which is the largest in any tahsil. Of the total area 75 percent is occupied, 8.7 is scrub jungle, 4.2 tree-forest, and 11.8 unculturable.
  Once Katol and Kalmeshwar talukas in Nagpur district had enough groundwater to irrigate their orange orchards, but in the past decade or so, the water table has gone down to 700–900 feet in almost the entire belt and digging of bore wells has become uneconomical. Farmers here have now switched to conventional dry-land farming of cotton and soybean, with the area under orange cultivation reduced almost to half.
caption: Cotton ready for harvest
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