Opinion | Kashmir Post Abrogation: A Region Rebuilding Itself

Six years is not a long time in the life of a region shaped by centuries of trade routes, empires and conflict. But for Jammu and Kashmir, the period since August 2019, when Articles 370 and 35A were read down, has been dense with change. Roads that took decades to plan finally got built. A railway line that engineers debated since the 1990s now carries passengers from Katra to Baramulla. Tourists who stayed away for years are returning, though not without setbacks. None of this settles the larger political debate around the abrogation itself, which remains contested in Kashmir and beyond. What can be described with more confidence is the pattern of development on the ground, sector by sector.

Uninterrupted Education

For a generation of Kashmiri students, school life was punctuated by hartals, curfews and long winter closures that stretched well past the usual break. Academic calendars slipped, and board exams were often delayed by months. That rhythm has changed. Schools have largely stayed open through the year, and the academic session has been realigned closer to the national calendar, a shift the administration has pushed as a way to stop Kashmiri students from losing a year relative to their peers elsewhere in India. Higher education has expanded too. AIIMS Jammu is now fully functional, running OPD, IPD and academic activity across more than forty departments. Its counterpart in Kashmir, AIIMS Awantipora in Pulwama, has been slower going, missing several announced deadlines and now targeted for completion by December 2026, but the physical progress on the 57-block campus is real even if the timeline has been frustrating for the region’s health and education planners. Alongside it, seven new medical colleges have been approved across the Union Territory in recent years. None of this erases the disruptions of earlier decades, but the daily experience of a student in Srinagar or Anantnag today looks considerably steadier than it did through most of the 2010s.

Railway

The Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link was sanctioned in 1994 and declared a national project in 2002, and for most of its life it existed as a promise rather than a working railway. That changed in January 2025, when the final and most difficult stretch, the 111-kilometre Katra-Banihal section, cleared safety inspections and opened to traffic. The engineering involved is genuinely unusual: the Chenab Bridge, at 359 metres above the riverbed, is the tallest railway bridge in the world, and the Anji Khad bridge nearby is India’s first cable-stayed rail bridge. Vande Bharat trains, adapted for Himalayan winters, now run between Katra and Srinagar, cutting a journey that once took the better part of a day by road down to a few hours. Traders in Srinagar’s fruit and handicraft markets have started talking about the railway’s effect on transport costs for apples and dry fruit headed to mandis outside the Valley, though it is still early to measure that impact in hard numbers. A new Uri-Baramulla line and the doubling of the Qazigund-Budgam stretch are on the drawing board, suggesting the rail network here is not yet finished expanding.

Tourism

Tourism numbers in Jammu and Kashmir tell a story with real ups and downs rather than a straight upward line. Annual arrivals rose from just over a crore in the years before 2019 to a record of roughly 2.3 crore in 2024, driven by both Valley tourism and the enormous pilgrim traffic to Vaishno Devi in Jammu. Comparing 2016-18 with 2023-25, total footfall across the Union Territory grew from about 4.76 crore to 7.85 crore, a jump the tourism department has repeatedly cited as evidence of a changed perception of Kashmir among Indian and foreign travellers. But 2025 was harder. The Pahalgam terror attack in April rattled visitor confidence, and Kashmir division arrivals fell from around 98 lakh in 2024 to roughly 47 lakh in 2025, even as Jammu’s pilgrimage-driven numbers stayed comparatively resilient. The government’s response has been to diversify rather than simply promote harder: plans for 300 new tourist destinations, a push into winter sports at Gulmarg, and offbeat circuits around Doodhpathri, Kokernag and Sonamarg aimed at spreading footfall beyond the handful of well-known spots. Whether that diversification builds a tourism economy less vulnerable to single incidents is something only the next few seasons will show.

Infrastructure

Away from the railway headlines, infrastructure spending has touched more mundane but consequential things: roads, tunnels, power supply and drinking water. The Banihal-Qazigund tunnel and the wider Jammu-Srinagar national highway upgrade have cut travel time on a route that used to shut for days at a stretch during landslides and snowfall. Government data points to a broader construction push across health, education and municipal infrastructure, much of it funded through the Prime Minister’s Development Package and successive Union budgets for the Union Territory. Progress has been uneven. AIIMS Awantipora is the clearest example of a flagship project running years behind its original 2025 target, with costs rising past Rs 2,160 crore against an initial estimate of Rs 1,828 crore. That kind of delay is a reminder that ambitious infrastructure plans in mountainous terrain rarely move as fast as announcements suggest, even when the underlying commitment of funds is not in question.

Peace

Security in Kashmir has improved by most conventional measures since 2019, with a marked drop in the frequency of large-scale shutdowns, strikes and street clashes that once defined life in Srinagar’s old city and beyond. Local body and assembly elections have been held, including the 2024 assembly polls that brought Omar Abdullah back as chief minister, offering the region an elected government after years of central rule. Even so, the Pahalgam attack in April 2025 was a stark reminder that the security situation, while calmer on average, is not free of shocks, and it had immediate consequences for tourism, business confidence and the broader sense of normalcy that officials had been keen to project. Peace in Kashmir today looks less like the total absence of violence and more like a fragile, still-developing steadiness, punctuated by episodes that can undo months of goodwill in a single incident.

Schemes

A wide range of central and Union Territory schemes have been extended to Jammu and Kashmir in the years since 2019, from land reform and domicile-based employment provisions to housing, rural roads and agricultural support programmes that were previously restricted or delayed by the region’s earlier constitutional status. Horticulture, which supports a large share of Kashmiri households through apple, walnut and saffron cultivation, has received targeted attention through cold storage, high-density plantation and marketing initiatives. Start-up policies aimed at young entrepreneurs have found some traction in Srinagar and Jammu, even if the scale remains modest compared to established tech hubs elsewhere in India. As with infrastructure, the honest picture is mixed: some schemes have reached intended beneficiaries quickly, while others, like AIIMS Awantipora’s staffing and construction targets, have moved more slowly than announced.

Taken together, these six threads describe a region in the middle of a long, uneven rebuilding process rather than one that has arrived at a finished destination. Roads and railways have opened, tourism has grown and then wobbled, schools have stayed open more consistently, and a raft of schemes has reached the Valley and Jammu alike. What remains true is that Kashmir’s development story cannot be separated from questions of security and public sentiment, and events like the Pahalgam attack show how quickly gains on one front can be tested by setbacks on another. The coming years, particularly as AIIMS Awantipora, the Uri rail extension and further tourism diversification move from plan to completion, will offer a clearer sense of whether this period of investment translates into lasting stability for the people who call Kashmir home.

aatiflonekashmir@gmail.com