Perundurai sits on National Highway 544 at the western entry to Erode, about 18 km from the city bus terminus. It became a municipality in 2025, and most of its growth over the last two decades has come from one source: the SIPCOT industrial estate and SEZ complex on its edge.
The state set up the estate in July 2000 on roughly two thousand acres and acquired about sixteen hundred acres more in 2007. Textile processing units moved in from Tiruppur, Coimbatore and Erode city, followed by engineering, ceramics and other manufacturers, and the population around the town grew with them.
Alongside the factories, Perundurai has become a college town. Kongu Engineering College, the Nandha group, Erode Sengunthar Engineering College and several arts, pharmacy and polytechnic colleges are here, as is the Government Erode Medical College and Hospital, formerly the IRT medical college run by the state transport corporation.
That mix produces a particular kind of paperwork: gate registers and contract labour sheets at the units, lot cards in the processing houses, hostel, bus and fee records on the campuses, and daily cash books in the shops and lodges along the highway. For the city's own trade, read our Erode page; the carpet town across the district has its own Bhavani page.