Guru Nanak Dev Ji spent the last years of his life at Kartarpur on the Ravi, farming and teaching. Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur stands there. It is in Narowal district, Pakistan, about four kilometres from the Indian border.
The Kartarpur Corridor opened on 9 November 2019, letting Indian pilgrims cross without a visa. It was designed for 5,000 pilgrims a day.
Actual traffic averaged fewer than 200 a day. Cumulative crossings reached about 235,000 by December 2023. In 2023, 96,555 people crossed, paying a $20 fee. Figures for applications refused have been reported in the Indian press year by year and are not published by either government, so they cannot be checked here.
The corridor has been closed since May 2025. It was still closed at its sixth anniversary in November 2025, though the bilateral agreement was extended to 2029.
Under four per cent of permitted capacity, on the journey with the strongest emotional pull available to this population. The constraint is paperwork, not desire.
What was set up there was a working settlement and not a retreat. Land was farmed, the sangat gathered morning and evening, the langar was cooked and eaten by everybody together, and all of it was done by a man who had spent twenty years travelling and then stopped. The institutions come out of those last years rather than out of the journeys.
The succession to Guru Angad Dev Ji happened there, and the account of the two traditions dividing the cloth over the body is fixed to that site.
The river has moved and the present gurdwara does not stand on the original ground. The corridor from Dera Baba Nanak opened in November 2019.