The Road That Remembers

Two tunnels, two decades, and too many delays, but change is finally coming to Kashmir’s most fragile road.

- Er Navaid Runyal

The Ramban-Banihal stretch was never just a road. For people like me, it was a gamble with time, a daily test of nerves, a crack in the spine of Kashmir that swallowed chances, appointments, and sometimes lives.

T've seen this highway through fogged windshields and freezing nights, through blocked paths and broken schedules.

And standing there today, watching it transform into a four-lane lifeline, | felt something I wasn't prepared for: hope.

This road has held too much, I remember the ambulances that couldn't move. The families who walked for miles because buses gave up. The tourists stranded without food. The repeated calls we made, asking if traffic had moved beyond Panthyal.

The answer always seemed the same: “Sab kuch Banihal se aage ruk gaya hai.”

For so long, we've known this stretch as the place where time stood still, where nature decided whether a child reached school or a patient reached a hospital, and where weddings were postponed and funerals were delayed.

This was beyond potholes or poor maintenance. It was about a whole region being forced to live with uncertainty.

And yet, now, something is changing.

I stood and watched cranes bend steel into bridges. I saw tunnels breaking through mountains that once stood in the way.

The new TS5 tunnel, bypassing Panthyal, means something deeper than convenience.