Ghaziabad: More than 800 tractors took to the Eastern Peripheral Expressway (EPE) on Thursday when a group of farmers protesting the new farm laws carried out their eight-hour tractor march ahead of the talks with the government on Friday. Officials of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) said that they had to stop traffic for nearly seven hours on the 135km-long EPE in the wake of the farmers’ tractor rally.
The tractor march in western UP was taken up by the farmers from the UP Gate who started with about 150 tractors at 9.30am and also joined by around 50 cars and other vehicles. They drove on the inner expressway lanes of the Delhi-Meerut Expressway (DME) for about one hour to reach the EPE’s Dasna interchange (about 23 km) while the regular commuter traffic was confined to the highway lanes of DME.
The farmers had earlier planned that from the Dasna interchange they would move to EPE up to Palwal. However, they cut short the travel and went up to the Sirsa toll near Dankaur in Gautam Budh Nagar and returned to the UP Gate by 5.30pm.
