The Road That Cuts through Memories: How Places Were Built,Broken and Are Being Reshaped by NH-154

Urban spaces and dichotomies in South Asia are a living panorama. They grow through

the everyday cadence of people who build social space, who create markets, share

walls, exchange labour, create dialogue, cultivate fields, raise families and carry

remembrance across generations. The fact is that movements, the topography, work,

kinship and belonging shape places before any planning document arrives. Yet, when

major infrastructure projects appear, highways, bypasses and bridges often end up

treating the lived worlds as if they were empty; there is nothing rooted. Development

challenges and celebrates the fissures and the final layers of the asphalt, but forgets the

rough human history beneath it, the years of pain, uncertainty, the trees cut silently, the

labourers who migrated, the displacement of small vendors and ancestral homes, and

the erasures, emotional distances created long before physical distances are shortened

in the rebuilding nature. The Mandi-Pathankot Highway (NH-154) makes this

contradiction absolute and gives out a crystal-clear vision. This is the road that links

Mandi in Himachal Pradesh to Pathankot in Punjab, and is one of the massive

infrastructural projects that has been undertaken in this region. The road has been

promised and is put forth as a step towards modernising travel for tourists across the

scenic mountains. It has ensured faster movement of goods, easier accessibility for

people and economic endeavours. It has taken a step towards an eight- thousand-crore

budget (which may vary due to inflation), which includes plans for four lanes, tunnels,

widened curves, and bridges to bring the glory of Himachal’s mobility closer to national

standards. On a map, this looks neat and the purview of the government records, but in

reality, the highway passes through villages and emotional worlds that were already

built, and is being unmade with bulldozers and remade by concrete.

Figure 1- A road construction site on NH 154, the highway moves forward, reshaping

land and everyday life in Shahpur

The striking contradiction lies in administrative changes that altered the alignment of this Highway. Over the years, discussions about the alignment shifted; the earlier route

suggested that it would pass through more villages and towns and would rely more on

the stretches. Later, the iterations appeared and shifted away from major towns like

Palampur, Baijnath and Joginder Nagar and deeper into forested sensitive areas.

Locals have opposed these changes, arguing that newer alignments reduce the benefits

that the project was initially expected to bring while increasing the ecological and social

disruption. Since the official Detailed Project Reports are not available to the public,

these also show that the shifts have contributed to the mistrust and concern about how

decisions are being made and communicated in fragments, involving confusion and lack

of confidence. Their protests were not against a version of development that bypassed

people, even as it demanded their sacrifice and silent approval. This shaping and

reshaping have led to larger contradictions that become deeply personal when we listen

to the voices from Shahpur, Dramman and Rajol. These three places sit along the

highway, they shed tears, and it reveals the cycle of building, breaking and reshaping.

As this project enters the lived spaces of Shahpur Market, the realities hinder. Shahpur

is a town situated between Dharamshala and Kangra, neither large nor small, yet full of

its own life. The truth, when explored through physical and human geography, is located

in the foothills of Himachal Pradesh, wrapped in breathtaking and magnificent hills,

fields, schools, forests and the long history of the market. The market in Shahpur is

approximately one kilometre long, which is tightly packed with shops with no room to

breathe, and has been carrying the legacy of more than seventy years. This stretch

supports more than 1500 people; it didn’t appear because of any planned commercial

policy. It was built slowly, patiently, with triumph through the work of families, the trust

between neighbours, the unity that was formed over decades and the routines that

shaped daily life. Generations have grown up behind these counters. People have

borrowed and shared, they lend ladders, borrowed tools and now share the story of

pain.

Figure 2- A building caught between what it was and what it is yet to become

For Shahpur, tenants, the migrant worker, the shopkeepers were not losing their

livelihood but meant losing their existence and memories. One shopkeeper captured

and reiterated, “Mein apni maa ko kaise bech dun? (How can I sell my mother? The

context turns out that the mother here is the land.) When the news of the acquisition

spread, the residents tried to understand what was happening. The Detailed Project

Report, which should have been publicly available, is still in the shadows of dust.

Notices arrived with unclear measurements, and compensation rates differed sharply

between neighbouring stretches. The tussle between the circle rate and government

r̥ates continues as many people registered their lands at low values in the past to

reduce taxes, and now the government uses the same to compensate. The sadness

revolves around the tenants who have run the shops for the past thirty to forty years,

and as buildings are broken down, the tenants have no right to compensation. Shahpur

had more chaos as a few per cent of their land belonged to the Cantonment, and thus it

was directly transferred, with their livelihood and their lives at stake. Shahpur needed

dialogue, not notices, and they formed the Shahpur Bazar Bachao Sangharsh Samiti

community-led protest, where men and women sat on hunger strikes. They proposed

alternatives such as narrow widening, which would be at the same length as the bridge

or constructing a flyover or small alignment shifts that could save the market while

allowing the highway to be built. The irony remained as someone asked for a dialogue

and received demolished buildings and dreams. People note how they were forced to

sign. People mark the machines and the symbols as their trauma. In the same stretch,

another extension, the Dramman market, shows a different phase in the cycle of

development. Demolition began on the eve of 17 th January 2024. People were

removed, and bulldozers were taken to their households, claiming that forest land

belonged to the NHAI, and thus, the helpless masses didn’t know that the land where

they stayed, paying electricity bills, is now in ruins. They lived in this land for

generations together with water connections, and panchayat taxes, making the land feel

legitimate. But as the highway was built, decades of building disappeared, and

unmaking began in different administrative categories.

Kangra district could mention its happiness and perils. Thus, another market in Rajol, as

anthropologists describe the waiting, this market is half-deserted, people work and are

waiting for their demolition notices and do not have the ability or the determination to

fight for their rights. The loss of hope has blanketed a massive part of the market. Few

people wait for clarity and think about the future economic landscape. Waiting has

become a way of survival, and there is also hope that a new road will bring new

opportunities. In Rajol, market development has not yet been destroyed or rebuilt. It has

suspended life in time, placing people in a long stretch of building and unbuilding

themselves in the present.

Figure 4- Labour and machines rebuild the landscape, even as lives around it remain

uncertain.

There has been an environmental impact deeply tied to human disruption. Since 2018,

there have been hectares of forest being cleared in different packages. Trees such as

Sheesham, Deodar, Mango and Jamun have been cut at low compensation rates.

Despite official requirements, there has been no compensatory afforestation in the

region. It has to be noted that wells have dried, landslides have increased due to

unregulated muck dumping, the slopes have weakened, and forest-dependent incomes

have decreased. Nature is being reshaped quietly, and the losses are not

acknowledged, though local communities depend on the environment for their survival.

Across Shahpur, Dramman and Rajol, bureaucratic violence shapes the experience,

DPR is withheld with package stories, and compensation rates are decided by the

“Competent Authority for Land Acquisition”. Tenants remained unrecognised, forest loss

is underreported, and the officials repeat phrases like “inevitable and greater good”.

Displacement happens not only through machines, but through silences. Ordinary

people are burdened with legalities. Unmaking in the contest begins long before any

wall falls. It begins when people are uninformed and do not realise they are being

exploited. This highway isn’t a road; it is the reflection. It presents a picture of how

South Asia builds through everyday life, unmakes in the context of sudden development

projects, rebuilt through resistance and reshaped through the forces that lie beyond

control. The highway represents development, not in monetary value but in the lives it

touches, the trees it removes, the livelihoods it disrupts and the future it transforms.

Infrastructure should treat people as the cost of progress and the centre of progress.

Development should open its ear to listen, to include, to be just, and then the roads will

connect lives instead of boundaries and the symbols that separate them. The story here

is the lived realities of a small portion of NH-154, where a story of building, breaking,

rebuilding and reshaping is presented. A story of Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh is

not a representation of a district but the voices of the entire subcontinent where the

challenges and futures are reflected in the blurred lines of development.

Anugraha K Kurian is a researcher and ethnographer whose work dwells in the human landscapes of borderlands, culture, and governance. She is currently a doctoral scholar in the joint PhD programme of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Monash University, and an alumna of the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. Her research attends to narrating belonging, memory, and power in spaces shaped by movement and change. Trained across development studies and the humanities, she is also a Kathakali artist and educator. 

Tanya is a postgraduate student from IIT Mandi, Himachal Pradesh. Both of them completed this project with a team of four members under the guidance of Dr. Nilamber Chhetri.