A Degree of Neglect

In 2010, the Government sanctioned a degree college for the students of Marwah, a remote subdivision of Kishtwar cut off by snow for nearly seven months a year. Today, in 2026, that promise still stands unfulfilled - pillars raised, walls half-built, and a projected completion date of 2027 that residents have every reason to distrust. Down the road, Chatroo's story is a grim mirror image: twelve years on, its college too remains a shell. This is not merely delay. It is a portrait of how little the Chenab region's children matter to the officials meant to serve them.

Consider what "college" has meant, in practice, for the nearly hundred students of Marwah: four or five rooms in a rented building, no Science or Commerce stream, an overwhelmingly contractual faculty, and no incentive for qualified teachers to serve in an area so remote that even the workforce building the college struggles to show up. Students wanting a medical or non-medical future must leave the area altogether - an exit tax on ambition that poorer families simply cannot afford. It is little wonder that the young, especially young men, drift away from Marwah entirely in search of an education their own Government failed to build for them.

The explanations on offer are almost insulting in their casualness. A short working season. Reluctant contractors. Tenders cancelled for lack of competition. These are real constraints of geography - but they are precisely why meticulous planning, not piecemeal contracting, was called for from the start. Instead, the Police Housing Corporation Division - an agency with no evident expertise in constructing academic institutions, and entrusted with the project instead of PWD(R&B) - chose to break the work into fragments, doling out structure, brickwork, boundary walls, and finishing to a rotating cast of contractors, each stage triggering a fresh round of tendering and fresh months of delay. Education cannot be allowed to join the queue of all-weather roads among indefinitely deferred necessities. A road delay costs convenience. A college delayed costs an entire generation's access to quality education.

Sixteen years is not a construction timeline; it is a policy failure. The Police Housing Corporation's excuses do not withstand scrutiny, and the burden cannot keep falling on students to make do with what little is offered. The Government must step in-with a fixed, funded, monitored deadline-and ensure that this ordeal, and the diminished opportunities it has produced, ends now.