The farmers' protest and the police barricades blocking the Singhu border have taken a toll on the picturesque Delhi-Panipat highway, which now goes through the fields.
The National Highway 1 is a four-lane highway starting from Delhi through Sonipat to Attari in Punjab. At the Singhu village, thousands of protesting farmers have been sitting on both sides of the highway since November 26. The Delhi Police has added its own barricading to the highway after the violence of the Republic Day tractor parade.
For the regular commuters, therefore, the road to Haryana and Punjab now goes through the narrow lanes of the Singhu village. The traffic has been diverted more than 2 km before the MCD toll plaza at Singhu, which is the starting point for the 'tent city' of the protests. Travellers now have to take a turn either from Alipur towards Narela and the KMP Expressway or take the narrow semi-kaccha roads through the fields.
One may come speeding down the highway till the Singhola village, about 2 km from the border, to see a line of cement barricades and policemen, take a U-turn on the highway, and then take a left into the village road.
The lane winds through fields of mustard, banked by trees whose branches scrape the sides of cars as the road is too narrow to fit two cars travelling in opposite directions.
If it rains, the collected water hides the potholes and the route adds several minutes of standstill traffic to the commute.
A tempo driver, who regularly transports goods from Ghaziabad to Kundli, says his daily commute time has tripled. "It used to take about an hour to reach Kundli before the protests. Now it takes 2-3 hours. Driving through this narrow road takes a long time," he says.
After the fields, the road passes through the Singhu village, whose residents say that they feel unsafe with the increased load of traffic. "It has been such a long time that the highway is closed and these cars come right in front of the gate. Our children can't go outside," says a resident.
Past the narrow lanes of the village proper, comes the industrial area. The back roads, half-filled with parked containers and goods trucks, have also become a part of the de facto "highway".
"When the highway was open, we would use the main road. This is the back road which used to be for parking of trucks but is now being used as the main thoroughfare," says Mukesh, a guard at one of the many factories in Kundli, which is on the Haryana side of the border.
A twist and turn through the backroads for a couple of kilometres, one finally reaches the smooth paved roads of Kundli, which run parallel to the highway. From there, is the straight and much smoother road to the KMP Expressway.