WaPo: Ratan Singh, an Indian rice farmer, used to have trouble sleeping. His village lies dangerously close to Pakistan, and in the past two years he has seen more than a half-dozen villagers and hundreds of cattle die in cross-border shooting.

But since India built a thick mud wall and an 8-foot-high, 3-tier maze of barbed-wire fence near the border in Kashmir, the guns have fallen silent.

"We are safe now, and I sleep peacefully," said Singh, 80. But he has a new problem. With the border fence that Indian soldiers erected near the turbulent, zigzag boundary last year, most of his farmland now falls on the other side, exposed to the Pakistani patrol posts. "I am too scared to go to my farm now," said Singh, as he pointed toward his land.

The fence is part of India's ambitious project to seal its entire 1,800-mile border with Pakistan. Even as India embarks on a peace process with its rival this summer, the massive effort has come to illustrate the deep suspicion, hostility and paranoia that have bedeviled relations between the nuclear neighbors for more than half a century.