Azad Kashmir’s Development Crisis and the Promise Unfulfilled
Understanding the Economic and Governance Challenges Facing Pakistan’s Kashmiri Region
When residents of Azad Jammu and Kashmir recall 1947, they speak of a decision freely made. The Muslim Conference leadership weighed independence but chose Pakistan, with the expectation that Azad Kashmir would be a partner in the federation rather than a periphery mined for resources. That was the political and moral bargain that underwrote accession: shared sovereignty, shared benefits, shared burdens.
Nearly eight decades later, that bargain is in crisis. In May 2024, more than a million people—approximately one quarter of the region’s 4.5 million residents—took to the streets in the largest demonstrations in AJK’s history. Four people were killed. Internet services were cut. Paramilitary units were brought in from Punjab. And still, most citizens elsewhere in Pakistan remained unfamiliar with the substance of the grievances that drove people to risk their lives. The prevailing national stories framed the protests as a security disturbance, a lapse in public order, or an episode of external manipulation. They were not. They were a reckoning with broken promises.
This is not a separatist movement. The protesters state this consistently. It is not an imported agenda. It is a record of extractive policy layered over decades: electricity priced far above generation cost for the very people who host dams, royalties withheld over half a century, agriculture constrained by remote bureaucracies, daily bread sold as either unaffordable or unfit to eat, a public square managed by censorship and blackouts, and a governance structure that reserves core decisions for federal institutions while handing local legislators the appearance of authority without its substance.
What follows is a long-form account of how that bargain broke down, across electricity, food security, propaganda and censorship, land and water, education and youth, infrastructure and governance, forests and environmental collapse, and the still-ignored roadmap presented as the 36-point charter of demands.
I. Electricity: Producing for the Grid, Paying for Darkness
Azad Kashmir generates roughly 3,000 megawatts of hydropower—almost a third of Pakistan’s total hydroelectric output. The Mangla Dam has been producing since the late 1960s, and the Neelum–Jhelum Hydropower Project began operation in 2018 after long delays and ballooning costs. These are not marginal assets; they are central to the stability of the national grid. They depend on rivers that run through AJK, land that communities surrendered, and valleys that were reshaped by tunnels and spillways.
Yet in AJK itself, households face unit charges commonly cited at around Rs. 30 or higher, while the cost of producing hydroelectric power is closer to Rs. 2–3 per unit. The gap is not a function of physics. It is a function of policy choices that fold local hydropower into a national pricing system designed around Independent Power Producer contracts and capacity payments—obligations that add significant costs to kilowatt-hours, even when the marginal power is cheap.
A priority structure compounds the grievance. When a new plant is built under an IPP model, the developer’s entitlements are filled first. Then the federal utility takes its share for dispatch to the grid. Only after these are satisfied do local needs enter the queue. The community that hosts generation becomes a downstream consumer of what it produces, and the state that aggregates power assumes the position of first beneficiary.
The finances tell a parallel story. Residents speak of a historical royalty debt—decades of generation at Mangla without compensation. The economic calculation is debated in the details but not in principle: for well over half a century, enormous electricity value has been extracted while AJK’s public budgets saw little that resembled a royalty stream. On the ground, the consequences are blunt. In 2023, suicides rose among men unable to reconcile monthly bills of fifteen to twenty-five thousand rupees with incomes that barely doubled those amounts. The bill becomes more than a utility statement; it becomes a lethal pressure.
The rationale that dispatch must be national is familiar. The grid needs balance. The system must optimize. But the equity, in a federation that presumes reciprocity, is missing. AJK accepts the dams, surrenders land, lives with altered landscapes, and then pays premiums for the outcome while others consume the benefits. It is not merely a pricing mismatch; it is a hierarchy of access.
II. Wheat: Subsidies Announced, Scarcity Delivered
Electricity is the largest bill; wheat is the daily staple. Here too, the pattern repeats. Relief is announced. Photographs are taken at utility stores. Rates are promised at a subsidized figure unlikely to hold past a few weeks. Then the shelves revert to market prices and local families are left to do the arithmetic all over again.
When subsidized grain does arrive, another problem emerges: quality. Households report stones and dirt mixed through the flour, a musty smell that betrays poor storage, signs of moisture that accelerate spoilage. Rotis made from this wheat carry a taste that confirms what the eyes already suspected. Families must decide between unfit grain at subsidized rates and a reliable product at unaffordable prices. In a month, a family may need twenty kilograms; at Rs. 120–140 per kilogram, that line item alone can swallow a large share of a wage earner’s income.
A final insult completes the cycle. Subsidized wheat is smuggled out. Trucks travel at night. Checkpoints are told not to stop certain vehicles. The arbitrage is straightforward: buy low at the subsidy, sell at market elsewhere in Pakistan or along porous crossings. The region that was to be protected as a priority consumer becomes an extraction point for subsidized goods to be redistributed for profit. Residents face scarcity that is not natural but engineered by the way the system is policed—or not policed—on their roads.
III. Propaganda and Silence: Framing Grievance as Disloyalty
When more than a million residents protested in May 2024, the coverage most Pakistanis saw did not concentrate on tariffs, royalties, dam policies, wheat distribution, or land restrictions. It focused on order, control, and the specter of foreign involvement. The accusation template has been well practiced: link protest to Indian intelligence, dismiss grievances as manipulated, and return discourse to the terrain of security where force is an acceptable answer.
This framing is supplemented by censorship mechanisms that are both legal and technical. The interim constitutional framework in AJK allows little room to question accession or federal policy; doing so can be treated as a constitutional offense. Protest regulation requires prior permission to assemble. During the most sensitive moments, the internet is switched off. Mobile, broadband, and sometimes even landlines go dark. Families cannot contact one another. Journalists cannot report. Doctors cannot coordinate. The public square is emptied of communication at precisely those times when the state’s behavior most demands scrutiny.
The media landscape then carries the story further. A newspaper that prints uncomfortable facts is charged with defamation and “fake news.” A journalist who writes critically risks disappearance. The aim is not to win an argument; it is to remove the capacity to argue at all. And for audiences outside AJK, this ensures that the default perception is shaped by official releases, controlled broadcasts, and a steady suggestion that those who complain are serving someone else’s agenda.
IV. Land and Agriculture: Ownership Without Autonomy
Hydropower in AJK is ninety percent engineering and ten percent cartography—and all of that cartography sits inside people’s lives. The Neelum–Jhelum project carved more than fifty kilometers of tunnels through mountains below fields and villages. Farmers who once knew every terrace and channel by practice now need permission to dig a well, build a storehouse, or extend an irrigation line. The land that remains in title does not remain in use without approvals from agencies headquartered far away.
The compensation offered for land taken into project footprints is finite and often inadequate. The restriction on what remains is indefinite. A one-time payment cannot replace the ability to plant where and when one chooses. Nor can it bridge the gap when an engineering constraint becomes an agricultural constraint. The right to use becomes a file moving across desks; the gate to a field becomes a checkpoint in all but name.
This is why the conversations residents describe as consultations do not feel like consultations at all. The engineering plans arrive fully settled. Meetings are held. Concerns are “noted.” Outcomes rarely shift. The sequence communicates a simple reality: in AJK, the line between federal utility and federal authority is thin. Local institutions, however complete they appear in the lists of offices and titles, rarely hold the pen on decisions that govern how land is used.
V. Water and Geopolitics: Security at the Source
There is no economy in AJK without water. The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty divided the rivers that sustain life and electricity in this region. For decades, even amid intense hostility, water survived as a domain where rules were honored. But in the past decade, projects like India’s Kishanganga on the Neelum River upstream altered the operating assumptions for Neelum–Jhelum downstream. Arbitration allowed the upstream plant to proceed subject to minimum flows; neither side was satisfied, and downstream communities learned they could not count on water as a settled matter.
In April 2025, after the Pahalgam attack and the subsequent India–Pakistan crisis, India suspended key parts of the treaty’s operation, including hydrological data sharing. Flood warnings, seasonal flow data, and melt forecasts stopped. The risk moved from a technical spreadsheet to the planted field, the turbine hall, and the household that relies on predictable electricity. Farmers do not plant into uncertainty. Power plants cannot dispatch reliably without steady inflows. Households cannot make plans when grid constraints and price spikes arrive without warning.
None of this engages AJK as a party. The treaty is between states. The water flows through the territory that hosts the communities, but the controlling conversations occur elsewhere. The core resource is thus subject both to foreign decisions and to domestic ones in which local institutions are observers.
VI. Education on a Fault Line
The Line of Control is not just a border; it is a hazard to schools. When shelling resumes, roofs are punctured and windows shatter. Teachers return to classrooms and patch what they can, until traffic on the road fades because parents are unsure whether a mortar will fall today. Past escalations have closed hundreds of schools. The 2005 earthquake left scars that remain visible two decades later, in temporary structures that somehow became permanent and in hospitals that still lack equipment any ordinary district requires.
The toll is not just infrastructure. Children habituated to the percussion of artillery do not carry a normal stress load. Studies conducted before the most recent bouts of violence already showed significantly higher rates of anxiety and emotional strain among Kashmiri students compared to peers elsewhere. Add physical injury, and the constraints multiply. Most schools are not designed for children who use crutches or wheelchairs. Ramps are rare. Desks and corridors are not adapted. If a child loses a limb, it often means the end of formal education because the building itself says no.
The paradox is stark. Literacy and school participation are comparatively high. Families value education and push their children through levels that would be a point of pride for any region. Then the pipeline empties into a local job market that cannot absorb graduates at scale, and a built environment that can render people with disabilities functionally excluded from public life.
VII. Youth and Work: Degrees without Destinations
A generation stayed in school. They wrote the exams, passed, and graduated into a queue that does not move. Government hiring shrank. Private employers are few. Industrial zones promised years ago remain on paper or tied to power and road constraints that make basic operations uncertain. Tourism should be a natural employer in a landscape like AJK’s; it requires roads that hold in the rain, electricity that does not trip, clean water on tap, and connectivity that does not vanish when it is most needed. In too many valleys, these preconditions do not exist.
The immediate solution for families is migration. A brother to England, a sister to Dubai, a classmate to Karachi. Remittances stabilize households, but they represent the leakage of investment in human capital. The region bears the cost of schooling and social care. The dividend accrues elsewhere. A doctor trained in AJK treats patients under another jurisdiction’s payroll. An engineer sells their skill in a city with better grids and faster approvals. Aspiration does not die; it departs.
The question for young professionals becomes personal and structural at once: Does staying mean sacrificing an entire career arc? If yes, then departure is not disloyalty; it is rationality. The problem is not that people want to leave. It is that the system incentivizes exit at the exact moment when those people could build something local if a few basic constraints were lifted.
VIII. Infrastructure: Announced, Started, Stalled
A bridge is announced, then fenced, then partly built, then halted when a contract expires, a budget cycle slips, or a dispute surfaces between agencies. A road remains without guardrails on a stretch known for fatal slips. A hospital wing opens without the staff to run it. The earthquake’s memory hangs over every plan. Reconstruction did occur, and much of it mattered. But in many towns the difference between temporary and permanent is merely the quality of paint on a wall.
These are not simply stories of inefficiency or corruption, although both are present. They also reflect the logic of extraction. If a region’s primary value to the federation is measured in resource flows outward, the calculus that returns investment inward always trails. The budget is justified by megawatts delivered to Lahore, not by kilometers of road in Neelum Valley. The cost of delay is borne locally, and the benefit of completion is booked nationally. The incentive to sustain momentum on local infrastructure weakens when the system’s strongest rewards attach to assets that send value elsewhere.
IX. Protest and the Cycle of Force
The protests that crested in May 2024 were not a spontaneous fever. They followed a year of sit-ins that began around electricity billing and wheat pricing in Rawalakot. As numbers grew from dozens to hundreds to thousands and then into the hundreds of thousands, the state’s response hardened. The internet went down. Protest leaders were preemptively detained. Rangers and Frontier Constabulary units from outside the region arrived. Tear gas was used, then live rounds. Four people were killed.
Only once the streets had been cleared with force did the subsidies reappear. Electricity prices were temporarily cut into single digits per unit. Flour was to be sold at controlled rates. A stated package of twenty-three billion rupees was approved and described as permanent. The permanence lasted until the next round of bills and shortages, and the cycle reset with the same elements: protest, force, cut connectivity, arrest, announce relief, and deny structural change.
In November 2024, an ordinance required seven days’ notice for any assembly. In practice, the authority that one seeks permission from is the same authority that may be the subject of the protest. In 2025, the JKJAAC returned to the streets with a more comprehensive list of demands. Deaths and injuries followed, and again the script ran on accusations of foreign manipulation, assurances that most demands had already been met, and calls for dialogue under conditions in which dialogue cannot operate.
X. Governance Without Levers
Azad Kashmir possesses a legislature, a cabinet, and courts. On paper this resembles autonomy. In practice, the ministries that determine the essentials of daily life—power, water, major infrastructure, security—report to Islamabad. The Ministry of Kashmir Affairs sits between AJK institutions and federal decision-makers. WAPDA’s chain of authority is federal. Security deployment is federal. The intelligence apparatus operates its own directorate for the region.
A peculiar feature in the assembly further distorts representation: reserved seats for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir. The intent is understandable. The effect is less so. Legislators who do not live with AJK’s electricity tariffs, whose children do not attend schools along the Line of Control, whose families do not queue at utility stores, cast votes on policies that govern those realities for others. The principle of solidarity meets the practice of de-linkage.
A second feature is the absence of representation in Pakistan’s Parliament. AJK is embedded in the federation for policy purposes but has no voice in the legislature where national budgets and laws are passed. It is a version of taxation without representation remade for electricity, water, and land.
XI. Forests: The Silent Collapse
In 1947, forests covered close to half of AJK. By the early 2000s, coverage had fallen to around thirteen percent. Trees were cut by networks residents call the timber mafia. Enforcement was sporadic at best and obstructed at worst. Vehicles deemed beyond inspection moved loads without scrutiny. The result is a landscape that erodes faster, floods harder, and supports less wildlife. Rivers silt. Slopes fail. Tourism prospects fade because visitors do not travel to see denuded hills.
The ecological damage then returns as economic harm. Landslides close roads. Floods tear through villages. Drinking water quality deteriorates. The cost of repair sits on local budgets, while the profits of extraction flowed to a few who were connected enough to avoid oversight. The people pay twice: once in the loss of environmental services, and again in the taxes and remittances that finance the clean-up.
XII. The 36 Demands: A Straightforward Roadmap
In September 2025, the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee put forward a 36-point charter. The document does not call for independence. It asks for policies consistent with the way federations treat contributing regions.
The core pillars are simple.
Economic justice: electricity for residents at or near cost where power is locally generated; royalties paid on hydropower going back to Mangla’s inception and prospectively on all projects; relief from taxes that do not account for structural disadvantages; and an end to elite exemptions that shield officials from the very tariffs ordinary citizens must pay.
Governance reform: transparency in hiring; protection of freedom of expression; cessation of forced disappearances; respect for the State Subject regime; and revision of the reserved seats structure so that those who live under policies are those who vote on them.
Development and services: investment in hospitals, universities, and clean water; industrial zones; a credible plan for tourism infrastructure; and the establishment of an airport at Muzaffarabad to connect the region rather than isolate it.
Resource protection: meaningful local control over land and forests; a halt to large dam projects without consent and participation; and a crackdown on the organized networks that strip timber and divert subsidized wheat.
Legal guarantees: repeal of the ordinance that pre-permits protest; withdrawal of cases against journalists and newspapers brought for reporting facts or criticism; and a verifiable end to the practice of internet shutdowns as a tool of crowd control.
None of this is radical. These are the baseline mechanics of a federation that wants its parts to believe in the whole.
XIII. Numbers That Explain the Fracture
Some arguments can be made in theory. This one can be made in arithmetic.
Hydropower in AJK: about 3,000 megawatts feeding the national grid.
Local household tariffs described around Rs. 30 per unit while hydropower production costs are in the low single digits.
Decades of generation at Mangla with no royalty stream paid into AJK’s budgets.
Wheat that is announced at subsidized rates but often sold at more than double those promises.
Demonstrations that brought roughly a quarter of the region’s population onto the streets.
Deaths in 2024 and 2025 protests that occurred in the context of internet blackouts and deployments of paramilitary units.
A regional assembly in which non-resident votes can decide resident policies.
No seats in Pakistan’s Parliament for a region whose rivers and land sustain national infrastructure.
These are not slogans. They are the shape of a relationship.
XIV. Federal Reciprocity and the AJK Exception
In Pakistan’s federal practice, the principle of reciprocity exists in imperfect but recognizable forms. Provinces that host assets receive some blend of royalties, representation, and investment. In AJK, the pattern deviates. The assets are present. The benefits are not. The instruments that could correct this—royalty formulas, parliamentary seats, local control over local resources—remain idle or out of reach. The instruments used instead are ones of control: blackouts, ordinances that pre-permit assembly, prosecutions of reporters, and a constant insinuation that grievance equals disloyalty.
The word that residents use for this is not federalism. It is colonialism administered in national colors.
XV. History’s Warning, Without Equivalence
The analogy that comes first to mind is East Pakistan. It is not an exact fit, and it does not need to be. The warning is not that AJK will follow a predetermined path. The warning is that no population can be indefinitely asked to deliver resources, accept bills, surrender voice, and watch its journalists disappear, while being told that protest is treason and silence is duty. The center can maintain this posture only by increasing levels of repression or by narrowing the public square until it is no longer a square.
The protesters in AJK are explicit that they are not asking to leave. They are asking to be included honestly under terms they were promised in 1947 and have upheld through decades of border crises and conflict. If those terms are never honored, the risk is not a sudden break. It is a slow corrosion of allegiance that makes every crisis harder to manage and every compromise more brittle.
XVI. International Implications
Pakistan argues for Kashmiri welfare and voice on international platforms. The credibility of that case depends on how it treats the Kashmiris it already administers. If the daily record in AJK features unaffordable electricity from local rivers, no royalties from legacy dams, wheat that is unfit to eat, schools damaged by shelling, youth leaving because the system gives them no room to build, a constitution that constrains dissent, and a press that operates under threat, then the case loses force. The state appears to seek territory, not to protect people.
There is a clearer route. If AJK is administered as a partner—with fair pricing, royalties, investment, rights, and representation—it becomes the strongest argument that Pakistan’s interest in Kashmir is bound to Kashmiri well-being. The opposite administration proves the opposite claim.
XVII. The Opportunity Cost of Extraction
Even if one brackets questions of rights and history, the economics of the current approach are weak. An AJK that sees tangible returns on hydropower would back expansion rather than resist it. A tourism economy built on reliable roads, power, water, and connectivity would employ thousands and generate tax revenue that reduces the need for transfer payments. Agriculture given autonomy and irrigation upgrades would raise incomes, stabilize prices, and lower the political temperature around food.
Educated youth would be more likely to stay if their first years of work did not require expatriation. Early-stage industry would see AJK as a site worth siting in if electricity were priced in relation to local generation and not in relation to national obligations under contracts signed elsewhere. All of this represents GDP and welfare left on the table by a policy stance that treats AJK as a place to pull from rather than a place to build in.
XVIII. What a Functional Reset Would Look Like
There is nothing mysterious about repair. It does not require constitutional acrobatics. It requires policy choices.
Price locally generated hydropower for local consumers at cost plus distribution.
Establish and back-calculate royalties on dam operations and commit to a transparent schedule for arrears and future flows.
Place local needs first in dispatch from local plants, then the national grid.
Deliver wheat subsidies as inventory on shelves, not as numbers in press releases; police the smuggling routes that convert relief into profit.
Return agricultural autonomy by limiting restrictions to demonstrable engineering necessity and pay for permanent constraints.
End the use of internet blackouts for protest management and withdraw cases against journalists and newspapers that reported facts or criticism.
Investigate deaths and injuries from protest policing through independent channels and compensate families as a matter of record, not discretion.
Seat AJK in Pakistan’s Parliament proportionate to population.
Reform the assembly’s reserved seats to ensure that those who live with policies vote on them.
Fund infrastructure to a standard commensurate with the region’s contribution to national energy security.
Protect forests with enforcement that is indifferent to rank and vehicle, and rebuild cover as a long-term economic asset.
None of this asks for favors. It asks for the ordinary mechanics of federal fairness.
XIX. The Questions That Decide the Next Decade
AJK’s residents say they chose Pakistan in 1947. The question now is whether that choice is reciprocated in 2025, not in speeches but in bills, budgets, and laws. Does a household in Muzaffarabad pay for electrons at a price that respects the water under its hills, or do those electrons travel outward cheaply while the house goes dark at the end of a month? Does a dam’s ledger show a royalty line going into AJK’s accounts, or a line item that vanishes into general revenue? Does a farmer open a gate to a field they control, or a file at an office far away? Does a journalist publish a report and go home, or publish a report and disappear? Does a protest require a seven-day permission slip from the authority it protests?
These are not abstractions. They are the daily tests of whether partnership exists.
XX. Closing: Partnership, Re-stated Without Illusions
The protests of 2024 and 2025 are not a bid to exit. They are a demand that entry mean what it said. Azad Kashmir’s rivers power Pakistan’s cities. Its valleys host Pakistan’s dams. Its mountains stand along Pakistan’s frontier. The people who live there are entitled, on the logic of any federation, to pay fair prices for local power, to receive royalties for national assets sited in their home, to farm their land without encountering an institution that sees fields as a risk registry, to buy wheat that is edible at a price that matches a subsidy, to send their children to schools that do not collapse under shells, to speak about the policies that shape their lives without being accused of serving a foreign brief, and to exist online when it matters most.
To describe this is not to call for action. It is to state facts as they are lived. The record of the last two years confirms a pattern: announce relief under pressure, apply force when pressed, and obscure the rest. The record of the last seven decades confirms the rest of the pattern: build upstream, bill downstream, and govern at distance.
A federation can live with disagreement. It cannot live as a quiet empire over a region that remembers choosing to join. The choice made in 1947 can still be honored, but only if the mechanics of fairness replace the mechanics of extraction. Otherwise, the relationship persists by the power to silence rather than the power to persuade, and every blackout and accusation becomes another entry in an account that can no longer be squared.