Seven years after Jammu and Kashmir’s bifurcation broke its data series, a new government strategy promises real-time governance while leaving the old fracture unrepaired.
When Jammu and Kashmir was split into two Union Territories in October 2019, the loss was not only administrative. It was also epistemic. Ladakh’s departure from the statistical universe meant that GSDP, per capita income, consumption surveys, and employment data could no longer be cleanly compared across the 2019 threshold. Official tables now carry routine disclaimers marking transition-year growth as “Not Available.”
Researchers must either splice two incompatible series or abandon long-run analysis altogether. A region whose economic story spans insurgency, reconstruction and reorganisation now has, in effect, two separate statistical lives that do not speak to each other.
Into this fractured landscape arrives the Planning, Development and Monitoring Department’s new Data Management Strategy and Action Plan, an ambitious attempt to build an “integrated, secure, real-time data ecosystem” linking every department through common identifiers, Aadhaar, the Civil Registration System, the Ration Card Number and the APAAR ID.
Its pilot projects are genuinely promising: a death certificate that automatically triggers insurance claims, a birth registration that cascades into nutrition support, immunisation and eventual school enrolment. These are the kinds of frictionless, life-event-triggered services that could meaningfully reduce the burden citizens carry in proving the same facts to five different departments.
But ambition of this kind runs directly into the unresolved inheritance of 2019. The strategy’s own quality framework lists coherence and comparability as core to good data, yet neither document nor process addresses how pre- and post-bifurcation datasets are to be reconciled. Schools, hospitals and Anganwadi centres are still mapped to inconsistent local units; historical surveys were built around administrative boundaries that no longer exist. A system designed to deliver “evidence-based governance” cannot honestly claim that title while resting on evidence that cannot be compared to what came before it.
The two problems are, in truth, one problem. Kashmir does not lack the appetite for good data; its Directorate of Economics and Statistics built a credible system across two difficult decades before 2019. What it lacks is a deliberate reconciliation of past and present. As economist Haseeb Drabu has argued, the more defensible path is to adjust historical data to today’s territorial reality, not to leave every future user of these dashboards guessing where the old boundary quietly distorts the new numbers.
The new strategy, whatever its technical sophistication, cannot outrun this basic requirement. Interoperability between departments is a solvable engineering problem. Interoperability between a state’s past and its present is a harder, more deliberate act of institutional memory. Without it, Jammu and Kashmir risks building a real-time future on top of a statistical past it has never properly repaired.
