Kharar, Banur, Zirakpur, Dera Bassi and Kurali are the towns absorbing Chandigarh's expansion into Punjab.
They were market towns in the Powadh with their own histories and are now a continuous belt of housing, colleges and malls along the highways out of Chandigarh.
Land prices here are the highest in Punjab, farmland has been converted at a rate faster than anywhere else in the state, and the villages that were here have been absorbed into sectors and phases.
The private engineering and management college sector that grew along this belt in the 2000s has since contracted sharply as students left for abroad, and a number of campuses stand empty.
This is the only part of Punjab where the population is growing through in-migration rather than shrinking through emigration, and it is growing on the state's best agricultural land.
Kharar is where the road out of Chandigarh divides toward Ropar and toward Ludhiana, and it was a staging town on that route long before the city existed.
The conversion of land here has been done largely by private colonisers rather than by a planned extension, so the belt has ribbon development, uneven services and long disputes about what was promised at the time of sale.
The colleges built along this belt filled with students from across north India while engineering admissions were booming. Many now run well below capacity and several have closed.