About two hundred Punjab villages lie within a few kilometres of the Pakistan border, in Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Ferozepur and Fazilka districts.
They have been evacuated repeatedly: 1965, 1971, 2001 to 2002 during Operation Parakram, an order in 2016 that was given and then withdrawn, and again in May 2025 in Ferozepur, Fazilka and Amritsar. Each time people left with what they could carry and came back to whatever was there.
They have land beyond the fence, farmed under escort through gates that open at fixed hours, with crop restrictions on anything tall enough to hide in.
They have among the highest rates of military service and among the lowest rates of investment of anywhere in the state, for the same reason.
They also have a long history of cross-border kinship, since the villages on the other side were the same villages until 1947, and of smuggling, which is what a border produces everywhere.
Punjab's border belt is the part of the state that has paid most for the line and has been compensated least, and its villages have no separate voice in the state's politics at all.
The villages between the fence and the line farm under escort, and the gates open on a schedule set by the security forces rather than by the crop.
There is no industry, no investment and very little construction permitted in the belt, and the young people leave for the towns or abroad.
They also carry the recruitment. The border districts have the highest army enlistment and the worst drug indicators in the state, and both facts are about the same absence of anything else.