Dr Junaid Jazib
It was a rainy July morning last year when Abdul Rashid, a shopkeeper from Mendhar, set out for Srinagar to buy supplies. Thanks to the Mughal Road, what once felt like a distant journey now takes only a few hours-connecting people of Rajouri and Poonch to the Valley for shopping, healthcare, education and trade. For families like Rashid’s, this road is not just asphalt and stone; it is a lifeline.
But in the Pir Panjal region, quest for progress often carries a double edge. On his return the next day, Rashid found himself stranded near Peer Ki Gali. Overnight rains had triggered massive landslides, cutting through the road at multiple points and severing the fragile connection the highway had promised. Trapped in his vehicle for 17 hours, he sighed, “The mountains give us life-but when they are angry, nothing stands.”
His words capture the paradox of the region. On one side lies opportunity, mobility and modern conveniences; on the other, the ecological cost of carving roads, dams and tunnels into a young and sensitive mountain system. What was once occasional-landslides, cloudbursts, flash floods and subtle land shifts-has in recent years become alarmingly frequent here, marking a new phase in the region’s ecological history and rendering life for its inhabitants even more precarious, challenging and uncertain.
Indeed, the Pir Panjal region of Jammu and Kashmir, long perceived as a rugged frontier, has always yearned for connectivity and inclusion. For decades, residents of Rajouri and Poonch remained cut off from the Valley, their journeys dictated by geography and long detours through Jammu. The opening of the Mughal Road dramatically changed this sense of isolation. Suddenly, Srinagar was not a distant capital but a few hours’ drive away. For students seeking colleges, patients needing healthcare, traders looking for markets and families hoping to reunite with relatives, this single road became a bridge to opportunity.Seasonal migrants, Gujjars and Bakerwals driving their herds toward high-altitude pastures, also found in this passage a renewed ease of movement.
In fact,the region’s aspirations extend far beyond a single road. Proposals for tunnels, widened highways and new transport corridors now promise to bind the Pir Panjal more closely with both the Valley and Jammu. Each initiative is framed as a step toward progress-shorter journeys, stronger trade, easier access to services and even the prospect of tourism. For local economies, long reliant on remittances or subsistence farming, these projects kindle hopes of a more diversified and prosperous future.
Governments, too, invest the Pir Panjal with strategic importance. Infrastructure here is not only about providing facilities to people, but also about fostering integration, security and stability. A better-connected Pir Panjal can channel its fruits and handicrafts to wider markets, attract tourists to its meadows and shrines, and provide its youth with alternatives to migration. For the state, such projects promise stability; for communities, they promise dignity and opportunity.
Fairly speaking, development here should not be seen as a luxury-it is a long-overdue necessity, etched into the yearnings of people who have lived for generations at the very edge of access and attention. Villages lie snowbound for months; children walk miles through harsh terrain just to reach a classroom; the sick are borne on shoulders across rivers and ridges in search of healing. A hospital only after hours of perilous travel, a market silenced the moment a bridge gives way-these are not passing hardships but the pulse of daily life. Connectivity and growth, then, are not mere policy prescriptions; they are a plea for dignity, for belonging, for a future where the Pir Panjal is no longer a periphery, but a vital part of the nation’s unfolding story.
Yet necessity does not dissolve vulnerability. The Pir Panjal is not a blank canvas upon which engineers can draw straight lines of asphalt. It is a living landscape of forests, springs, slopes and soils-an intricate system that cradles both people and wildlife in fragile balance. Every bridge built is also a bridge disturbed; every tunnel drilled is a wound in the mountain’s body. The paradox is stark: the very projects meant to secure the region’s future also carry within them the seeds of its fragility and disruption. The real challenge is not whether development should arrive, but whether it can do so without tearing apart the ecological, cultural and spiritual foundations upon which the region’s liferests.
The Himalayas are often imagined as timeless, immovable walls of rock and snow. In truth, they are among the youngest and most delicate mountain systems on Earth, still rising, unsettled, and vulnerable to the slightest disturbance. In the western Himalayas, where the Pir Panjal and Chenab Valley lie, this vulnerability shapes daily life. Heavy rainfall, sharp slopes, and loose soils make these ranges beautiful but never fully stable. Landslides, cloudbursts, and sudden floods remind us that building here is never the same as building on a plain. It is to anchor human ambition on ground that is always shifting. The devastation of recent years, whether in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, or only days ago in Kishtwar, shows a hard truth: the more we disrupt, the more fiercely the mountains respond.
The Pir Panjal illustrates this environmental sensitivity in even clear, tangible ways. Its steep slopes are prone to landslides and soil slippage once disturbed, its thinning forests reduce slope stability and groundwater recharge, and its dense web of springs and streams responds quickly to even minor changes in land cover. When a road is carved into a hillside, the natural binding of soil and rock is weakened, making landslides more likely. When forests are cleared, infiltration declines, runoff intensifies, and local hydrology is thrown off balance. What appears as an isolated intervention is rarely contained; each action sets off chain reactions across the landscape, consequences that are too often underestimated in conventional planning.
Human pressures have deepened the vulnerabilities of these mountains. Timber extraction, overgrazing and unregulated construction have stripped away the green cover that once held slopes intact and fed the veins of springs and streams. Consequently, springs are drying, pastures shrinking, and sudden cloudbursts now wash away roads and bridges with alarming regularity.Roads cut without care and settlements expanded without planning have turned natural slopes into hazard zones. What older generations recall as rare calamities are now recurrent events. Developmental works may promise progress, yet when pursued without ecological foresight, they often unravel the very stability that sustains life in these ranges.
We must remember that when the mountains suffer, people suffer. Here, fragility and vulnerability are not only an environmental conditions but a lived experience on daily basis. A blocked road can mean a patient never reaches the hospital. A vanished spring forces women to walk miles for water. A meadow lost to erosion leaves herders without pasture or income. In these ranges, every wound in nature becomes a wound in human life.
This is the truth that must guide every discussion on development in Pir Panjal: human life and the life of the mountains are inseparably linked. To ignore the fragility of one is to endanger the survival of the other. Yet in this region, unfortunately, progress and precarity often arrive in the same package.
To frame development as either salvation or destruction is to miss the reality: it is both. Roads may bring medicines more quickly, but also landslides more frequently. Dams may bring electricity, but also displacement. The task before us is not to halt development, but to reimagine it-to ask how it can be pursued without tearing apart the ecological and cultural fabric that makes Pir Panjal what it is.People in these mountains need roads, schools, hospitals, and electricity no less than those in the plains. What they do not need is a form of development that solves one problem while creating ten others.The disasters in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and most recently in Kishtwar and Ramban should not only move us to mourning; they should awaken us to warning. Each landslide, each flood is not an isolated tragedy, but a message written in soil and water. Mountains dynamite-blasted for highways crumble with the first monsoon downpour. Valleys dammed without regard for sediment load or seismic faultlines swell into floods that were once unthinkable. These are not accidents of nature alone; they are consequences of choices made in haste and hubris. If we repeat these mistakes, it will not merely echo the grief of our neighbourhood-it will magnify it, for here fragility and human dependence run even closer together.
The debate, then, is not about whether development should come, but about the manner in which it arrives. The question is not one of denial, but of direction. The real questions lie in its terms of engagement with the mountains. Can roads be laid without unsettling the slopes on which villages rest? Can tunnels be carved without silencing the ancient springs that have sustained valleys for generations? Can connectivity be extended without unravelling the delicate ecological threads that bind forests, rivers, soils, and people into a single living system?
To treat development in Pir Panjalas a conquest over nature is to misread the Himalayas. These ranges do not yield to force; they remind us, again and again, that every incision provokes a geomorphic response. Progress here must be imagined not as an imposition on nature, but as a covenant with it. It must be a dialogue-an ongoing negotiation between human need and ecological wisdom, where progress is measured not only in kilometres of road or megawatts of power, but in the endurance of springs, the safety of slopes, and the continuity of cultural life that depends on them.
The task, thus, is not simply to bring facilities, but to ensure that roads, power, and housing arrive without dismantling the ecological and cultural foundations that give meaning to life here. True development in the mountains will be measured not in projects completed, but in springs that still flow, pastures that still sustain herders, and valleys that still hold human communities in harmony with their landscape.
What is needed is a reimagined approach, a new ethic of development that begins with the mountain, not against it. Roads must be designed and aligned with slope stability and drainage in mind, not simply the shortest route on a surveyor’s map. Hydropower projects should be scaled to local needs, not large-scale dams that disrupt the local hydrology and community fabrics. The lived knowledge of pastoralists, who for centuries have adapted with the seasons and left light footprints on these slopes, must be recognized as wisdom, not dismissed as relic. Above all, ecological fragility must be treated as a first principle of planning, not as an afterthought once the damage is already visible.
To live in Pir Panjal is to dwell in the embrace of fragile giants.These mountains hold us, but they also test us. They offer water, pasture, timber, and beauty but they also remind us that their gifts come with conditions. Ignore those conditions, and the ground beneath our feet will turn against us.
The Himalayas are not eternal walls; they are restless, rising, breathing forms of the Earth. Every landslide, every cloudburst, every broken road is not just a disaster-it is the mountain’s language, telling us that balance has been disturbed. And with each warning, the tone grows sharper: our survival is bound to the mountain’s survival.
That is why development, here, cannot be measured in kilometers of asphalt or megawatts on a grid. Its true measure lies in whether a child can walk to school without fear of collapsing slopes, whether a herder finds grass for his flock without exhausting the land and whether a spring still flows for the next generation.
Pir Panjal does not deny us the right to dream of progress. It only asks that our dreams take root in humility and respect, not in conquest. To care for these mountains is, ultimately, to care for ourselves-for in every crack that opens in stone, every river that swells beyond its banks, we glimpse a mirror of our own fragility.If we can learn to live lightly here, then we are not just saving the Pir Panjal; we are also rediscovering a way of being human that the world beyond these peaks desperately needs.
The author is HoD, Environmental Sciences, SCS Govt Degree College Mendhar (Poonch)
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