Haider Ali Askary
Recently Kargil came in the national news for all the right reason when the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRT&H) announced the construction of Zojila tunnel on the National Highway 1-A which connects Srinagar-Kargil-Leh. The Ministry in an official letter announced that Mumbai based IRB Infrastructure Developers has bagged the project for the construction, operation and maintenance of the tunnel spanning a length of 14.08 kilometers. If successfully put in place, some news agencies reported that, it will soon become South-East Asia’s longest tunnel. Being the biggest ever national highway order it stands at a cost of 9090 Crore. The construction of the tunnel is scheduled to be completed in seven years from now.
This in itself, indeed, was a huge relief and a sense of achievement for the people of Kargil who have been longing to hear this since decades. Successive political parties and politicians had promised and gone. A generation or two has already left the world yearning to see it get materialized. Another generation is waiting to vouch it in anticipation.
But, still, the plight of the people in Kargil is important to understand here. The Zojila pass, which is notorious for its late opening and early closure, is the only road which connects the region to the rest of the world through Srinagar remains closed for better half of every year. Since this is the only road which connects Ladakh with Kashmir, due to the closure of this road Ladakh remains cut-off from Kashmir and rest of the world for around five to six months every year. During these months, people of the region are left with no other option but to live in the “freezing open prison” in life-threatening condition. Owing to the ill-equipped district hospitals running with lack of high-tech facilities, the ‘critical’ patients are left at the mercy of God during winter months. Over the years this isolation has led to countless loss of lives, and great losses in terms of, among other spheres of life, foremost, education and health.
Thus, living with adverse condition for much of the year the need of an air service had been put forward time to time by the local populace. Though the demand for air connectivity, at least during winter months, for feasible system of communication is a long sought demand made by the people of Kargil. This incessant demand from Kargili populace every time failed to get an optimistic response from both the state and Union government since many decades.
While understanding the difficulties of the people there, one wonders why Kargil is not put on the air map of India, despite a well-constructed airport already in place. During all these years and decades, the state and Union government hand in glove had never attempted to substantially work on it except paying lip service to the people who fight for basic survival every winter. The successive parties in power repeatedly attempted to display ‘hasty-shows’ at the notorious airport on chilly winter mornings. More often after a round of stirring speeches from the rostrum it would usually lead to a benign inauguration of a ‘lorry sized’ private jet promised to launch throughout winter, only to never see it again after their retreat in the same jet.
Thanks to the strategic and cross border importance of Kargil, the Indian Air Force (IAF), however, sympathetically operate, since the past few years, the AN-32 Courier Service back and forth from Kargil to Srinagar and Jammu. This is nonetheless regarded as a feasible service, by the desperate population in their utter need. However, the difficulties are not done away with by this. The AN-32 Courier Service starts operating months after the closure of Zojila pass and stops early in spring before Kargil gets reconnected. The uncertainty of the schedule of flights and the constant cancellation with no specific reason(s) makes it difficult for the emergency passengers to rely on it. The mess in ticket availability is extremely unpleasant. Most importantly, the inhuman treatment by the authorities at the Srinagar and Jammu airport makes the people of Kargil almost ‘alien’. The kind of service which they provide is pathetic to say the least; it ranges from not providing trollies to not allowing private vehicles and assistants letting inside airport premises, to using abusive, discriminatory and derogatory languages to the passengers of Kargil.
The civilian air service is available only from Leh airport which hardly functions on a regular basis in winter reasoning bad weather condition. Needless to say, the fare gets sky rocketed during peak seasons of the year, because of the absence of a functional civil airport in Kargil.
This sense of isolation in Kargil most of the time let to anxieties, tensions and feeling of deprivation, marginalization and alienation among the people of Kargil. A good chunk of the population, who are economically affluent enough and could afford, migrate to Jammu, Delhi and even Srinagar in winter to get rid of the beating cold. Particularly, the old-aged and children had to migrate outside in order to equip with health benefits and due to other medical reasons like respiratory and cardiac problems in Kargil.
Therefore, both the state and union government need to understand the plight of the inhabitants of the barren island who continue to fight a battle of life-and-death situation every day throughout the winter months. This fight for basic survival must end sooner than later by including Kargil on the air map of India.
(The author is a Research Scholar at University of Delhi)
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