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Pakistan promised that the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor would transform Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. It delivered stalled dams, diverted rivers and a border crossing that its own traders blockaded. Across the Line of Control, Jammu and Kashmir’s railway, tunnels and hospitals serve the people who live there.
In August 2025, traders at the Sost dry port in Gilgit-Baltistan camped on the Karakoram Highway for 30 days. Their sit-in halted all trade between Pakistan and China through the Khunjerab Pass for a month. When police moved in, organisers say with tear gas and aerial firing, the clash injured six people, and the protests spread to Gilgit, Nagar, Hunza and Skardu. Sost is the entry point of China’s flagship corridor. Its own people shut it down.
A Gateway That Shut
The traders had good reason to rage. Three months earlier, they had complained that customs had held their consignments at the border for eight to twelve months despite their paying every tax, and they accused officials of extortion. Gilgit-Baltistan serves as the gateway to the corridor, yet its residents watch the containers pass and the profits leave.
The corridor’s spine runs past homes that sit in the dark. In January 2025, about 1,000 people in Hunza blocked the Karakoram Highway at minus 15 degrees Celsius because they received only one or two hours of electricity a day. In July 2026, residents of Gilgit and Chilas blocked it again over daily power cuts of more than ten hours.
Dams for Pakistan, Dry Taps for Kashmir
In Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK), the corridor arrived as dams. China Three Gorges planned the 1,124-megawatt Kohala project on the Jhelum, which would divert a second river away from Muzaffarabad. Residents fought back: protests halted work at the site for eight months, and on 29 January 2019 traders shut the city’s markets. They had watched the earlier Neelum–Jhelum diversion drive nearly 30 per cent of the residents of Chandra village to sell their livestock and leave, while those who stayed paid up to Rs 7,000 to truck in 4,000 litres of water. “Diverting the river is inhuman,” declared Faisal Kashmiri of the Darya Bachao Tehreek.
The project has stalled ever since. It missed its December 2018 deadline for financial close, and by mid-2024 its developer had acquired only 4,607 of the 8,600 kanals of land it needed. Lenders lost interest, and China’s state insurer, Sinosure, hesitated amid more than Rs 550 billion that Pakistani power companies owed to Chinese power producers. The company asked Pakistan to push its deadline back to September 2027.
The 700-megawatt Azad Pattan project fared no better. In its 2024–34 generation plan, Pakistan downgraded it from “committed” to “candidate”, and its Chinese developer had to write to the prime minister to plead for its revival.
Promises on Paper
In June 2019, PoJK’s then president, Sardar Masood Khan, promised to turn the territory into “the economic engine of Pakistan”. He pledged a 1,185-acre special economic zone at Mirpur, a dry port, a rail link and a highway on which work would start the following financial year. Seven years later, the Mansehra–Muzaffarabad–Mirpur Expressway remains a proposal, and Mirpur’s entire industrial zone employs just over 4,000 people.
Jammu and Kashmir: Built for Its Own People
Jammu and Kashmir offers the contrast. In June 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the 272-kilometre Udhampur–Srinagar–Baramulla rail link, a ₹43,780-crore line with 36 tunnels and 943 bridges. Its Chenab Bridge stands 359 metres above the riverbed, with the longest arch span of any railway bridge in the world, and the Anji Khad Bridge is India’s first cable-stayed railway bridge. More than 26,000 people worked on the line, and its builders laid over 215 kilometres of new access roads.
Kashmiris use what India built. In May 2026, the Jammu–Srinagar Vande Bharat Express ran up to 96 per cent full and carried about 40,000 passengers in its first nine days of regular service. The Z-Morh tunnel now gives Sonamarg year-round access. AIIMS Vijaypur already treats patients, and AIIMS Awantipora reached 78 per cent completion by July 2026. Even its dams pay dividends at home: under its 2021 agreement with NHPC, Jammu and Kashmir receives 12 per cent of the power free from three new projects.
A Corridor Through Kashmir, Not for It
The difference lies in whom the projects serve. Pakistan treats PoJK and Gilgit-Baltistan as a passage for Chinese trucks and a reservoir for Pakistani power, and their people pay in dried springs, stalled promises and blocked borders. India builds railways, tunnels and hospitals that carry Kashmiri passengers, treat Kashmiri patients and keep Kashmiri power at home. One corridor runs through Kashmir. The other runs for it.
Hailing from Kashmir and based in New Delhi, Mehak Farooq is a journalist specialising in defence and strategic affairs. Her work spans security, geopolitics, veterans’ welfare, foreign policy, and the evolving challenges of national and regional stability.
