Sukhnai Bridge Fiasco

Eleven years. That is how long the people of Sukhnai, the last village of the Warwan Valley in Kishtwar, have been waiting for a bridge of 45 metres. Not a tunnel through a mountain, not a four-lane highway, not a hydro project of national importance - a single through-type steel plate girder span across the Mursudhar, sanctioned at a little over Rs 1.9 crore. Work began around 2015. It is September 2026, and the villagers still edge across a decaying hanging footbridge, children and elderly included, with a river in spate below them.

The official explanation is by now familiar: paucity of funds, a short working season, harsh winters, a narrow and kutcha approach road, and difficulty in hauling material to a remote pocket. Every one of these facts was known before the first estimate was drawn up. Terrain does not surprise an engineering department that has worked in these valleys for decades; it is precisely what the department is paid to plan for. What the villagers describe is not a battle with nature but a rhythm of neglect - a few months of activity, then months of silence, no completion target, no senior officer at the site, no public representative in sight.

What makes this worse is that the bridge falls under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, a flagship programme built around the promise of last-mile connectivity, with online uploading of works, geo-tagged progress and supposedly active monitoring at multiple levels. If a project can sit on that dashboard for eleven years without anyone being answerable, the monitoring is ornamental. Nor is Sukhnai an aberration. Across Warwan, Marwah, Dachhan, Paddar and comparable pockets, health care, schooling, higher education, roads and even reliable electricity remain aspirations rather than entitlements.

Finally, isolation carries a cost beyond inconvenience. This valley, once combed during the Al-Faran hostage crisis, lies barely a few hours' walk from Pahalgam over Margan Top. An unwatched, underdeveloped corridor linking Kashmir to the Chenab region is a security liability as much as a development one.The Executive Engineer now promises completion within a month. We hope he is right. Or otherwise, if UT agencies cannot manage the logistics of high-altitude construction, the project should be handed to the Border Roads Organisation or another central agency equipped for exactly such terrain. The people of Sukhnai have the right to be hopeful to cross a river safely this year.