ਜ਼ੀਰਕਪੁਰਜ਼ੀਰਕਪੁਰ

Zirakpur is a city in SAS Nagar (Mohali) district of Punjab, India, at the foot of the Shivalik hills, where the highways to Delhi, Patiala and Shimla meet at Chandigarh's southern gate. A cluster of villages until the 1990s, it counted 95,553 people in 2011 after the fastest growth of any Punjab town of its size.

Where is Zirakpur?

Zirakpur is in Dera Bassi tehsil of SAS Nagar district, about 10 kilometres south of Chandigarh's centre, at about 350 metres above sea level in the Shivalik foothills. Three great roads cross here: National Highway 5 climbs north to Shimla through Kalka, National Highway 7 runs south to Patiala and Bathinda, and the Ambala to Chandigarh expressway carries the Delhi traffic in. Around the junction sit the neighbourhoods and former villages that make up the modern town: Baltana towards Panchkula, Dhakoli and Peer Muchalla on the east, Dayalpura towards the airport side, and the housing corridors of VIP Road and Patiala Road. Panchkula in Haryana is minutes away, and Mohali adjoins it on the west, so Zirakpur is the Punjab third of the Chandigarh Tricity.

History: a cluster of villages that became a city

For most of its history there was no single Zirakpur town. The name came from one small village among several scattered along the Chandigarh to Ambala highway, farming the flat land below the Shivaliks and serving travellers on the roads to Kalka and Shimla. The ground carries an older memory than the town: just south of the present junction, on the road to Rajpura, is where Bhai Jaita Ji rested on the saddest journey in Sikh history, an event still kept at Gurdwara Nabha Sahib.

The change came with Chandigarh. As the planned capital filled up and its building rules kept housing scarce and costly, families and businesses spilled south across the Punjab border to the first open land outside the Union Territory. Growth was slow at first, then sudden: the 2001 census still counted only 25,022 people, and a decade later the figure was 95,553. Expressways, the widened Chandigarh to Patiala road and the airport corridor turned the old villages into a near-continuous belt of housing societies, showrooms, hotels and banquet halls. A municipal council, today organised in 31 wards, now runs a town that barely existed a generation ago.

Geography and people

The 2011 census counted 95,553 residents in the municipal council: 50,497 men and 45,056 women, with 12,074 children under seven, 12.64 per cent of the town. The sex ratio was 892 women per 1,000 men, close to the Punjab average of 895. Literates numbered 73,715 among people aged seven and above, an effective literacy rate of 88.3 per cent, 91.4 per cent for men and 84.9 per cent for women, among the highest of any Punjab town. Scheduled Castes numbered 7,732, about 8.1 per cent.

By faith, the census recorded Hindus at 69,596 (72.8 per cent) and Sikhs at 21,355 (22.4 per cent), with Muslims at 3,211 (3.4 per cent) and smaller Christian and Jain communities. Punjabi was the first language of about 56 per cent of residents and Hindi of about 40 per cent, a mix that reflects the town's draw: staff and students tied to Chandigarh, workers from Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and further east, and Punjabi families priced out of the capital. The older local speech is Puadhi, the dialect of the Shivalik foothill belt. Work follows the Tricity: commuting to offices in Chandigarh and Mohali, real estate and construction, highway retail, hotels and the wedding trade.

Places of interest

Gurdwara Nabha Sahib, about 1.5 kilometres from the town centre on the Chandigarh to Rajpura road, is Zirakpur's historic shrine. The gurdwara's account tells how in November 1675 Bhai Jaita Ji, carrying the head of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji from Delhi towards Anandpur Sahib after the Guru's martyrdom, rested one night in the forest here at the hut of a Muslim faqir, Dargahi Shah, a follower of the Guru. The faqir set the head on a raised place of mud and kept watch over it all night, asking only that Guru Gobind Singh Ji one day give him darshan. In 1688, returning from Paonta Sahib after the Battle of Bhangani, Guru Gobind Singh Ji came to the hut barefoot, stayed a night and worshipped where his father's head had rested. Baba Banda Singh Bahadur is also remembered to have halted here before the Sirhind campaign. Nearby at Dhakoli stands Gurdwara Baoli Sahib, linked with the same 1688 visit.

At Chhat village on the Patiala road, a few minutes south, Chhatbir Zoo, formally the Mahendra Chaudhary Zoological Park, has been the largest zoo in Punjab since it was named in 1977 for the then governor of Punjab, Mahendra Chaudhary, its first animals brought from Guwahati Zoo in Assam. The park is home to about 369 mammals, 400 birds and 20 reptiles, among them Bengal tigers, Asiatic lions, leopards, elephants and gharials, and its 300 metre walk-in aviary, described as India's longest, shows 32 species of birds across five themed sections. For Tricity families it is the standard school-holiday day out.

The town's other landmarks are new: the malls and multiplexes of the highway junction, the banquet halls of VIP Road, and, near Nabha Sahib, a regional centre of the Sports Authority of India spread over about 15 acres, with a football field, a gymnasium hall and a six-lane athletics track, serving Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh.

Notable people

Zirakpur has no famous natives yet: its population history is too recent, and most of its residents were born somewhere else. The names its history carries are older. Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji's martyrdom journey passes through Nabha Sahib, and Guru Gobind Singh Ji's visit of 1688 is the town's founding memory. Bhai Jaita Ji, later Baba Jeevan Singh Ji, whom Guru Gobind Singh Ji blessed as Rangreta Guru Ka Beta, is honoured wherever that journey is retold. The modern town's makers are anonymous by comparison: the developers and colonisers, and the tens of thousands of commuter families who built a city out of villages within a single generation.

Getting there and Zirakpur today

Almost everyone reaches Zirakpur by road: it is the first Punjab town on the expressway from Ambala and Delhi, and inter-state buses from Chandigarh to Delhi, Patiala, Rajpura and Bathinda all pass through the junction, while city buses link it through the day with Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula. The nearest railway station is Chandigarh, about 7 kilometres away, and the international airport at Mohali is the town's air gateway, with the Aerocity and IT City developments beside it pulling new housing towards Dayalpura. The Greater Mohali Area Development Authority plans the town's growth, including a large planned Aerotropolis project near Dayalpura.

Today Zirakpur lives with the strains of its own success: heavy junction traffic, housing societies that rose faster than their roads and drains, and a council working to give planned shape to a town that grew first and planned later. Proposals to reorganise it into sectors on the Chandigarh pattern, and even to call it South Chandigarh, are debated locally. Its place in Punjab's geography is not debated: the southern gate of the Tricity, and the clearest example in the state of how a capital city remakes the countryside at its edge.