Every decade, Srinagar gets a new masterplan. New alignments for ring roads, new zones for housing, new dreams of a “smart city.” But drive just ten kilometers out – to Ichgam, Malmoh, or Khag – and you step into a geography that has never been planned, only endured. The asphalt ends, the drains disappear, and the architecture turns into a scattered argument with the landscape. The question is simple, but stinging: Why are masterplans made only for city expansion, and never for village development?
The Bias of Vision
Urban planners, architects, and bureaucrats behave as if progress is an urban monopoly. The city is seen as the future; the village as the past. Every institutional instinct, every budget line, every headline reinforces this bias. The irony is stark – Kashmir’s planners are obsessed with where the city will grow, but never with how the village will survive.
This is not just an administrative oversight. It is a civilizational distortion. The masterplan, which was supposed to be a document of collective destiny, has become a map of exclusion. It plans for the visible rich, not for the invisible majority.
The Colonial Blueprint
Our planning DNA was written in colonial ink. The British designed cities to control populations and extract resources; villages were left to fend for themselves. Independent India kept the blueprint but changed the vocabulary. Srinagar Development Authority replaced the imperial cantonment, but the mindset stayed – plan the center, neglect the periphery.
Even today, the very idea of a “village masterplan” sounds strange to officials. Yet, more than 70% of Kashmir lives in villages. If governance is the art of shaping where people live, then what does it mean that the majority live in spaces that have never been consciously designed?
The Anatomy of Neglect
Walk through a Kashmiri village and you’ll find proof everywhere. Houses are built without setbacks or drainage logic; shops sprout on the narrowest bends of the road; streams become sewers; karewas get sliced for shortcuts. Every construction decision is private, and every civic failure is public.
The truth is cruel – villages are governed by improvisation. No zoning, no hierarchy of spaces, no concept of green belts or community commons. In the absence of a plan, randomness becomes the ruler.
And then, when chaos accumulates, the urban authority arrives to absorb it. Villages are not developed; they are eventually annexed by cities that outgrow their conscience.
The Ecological Price
This absence of planning is not just aesthetic; it is existential. Kashmir’s ecological damage begins where its planning ends. The karewas are flattened, the wetlands filled, and the streams straightened – all in the name of informal rural “development.”
Yet, those same ecological features are what make the Valley livable. Cities drink from village aquifers, breathe through village forests, and eat from village soils. By neglecting rural planning, we are slowly strangling the lungs of our own cities.
The tragedy is not that cities expand – but that villages were never allowed to exist with dignity.
The Cultural Cost
A village without design soon becomes a settlement without memory. The old shared spaces – the temple courtyard, the community pond, the bund that hosted evening gossip – disappear into uncoordinated construction. Every home builds a boundary wall, and the idea of the village as a living organism collapses.
In the new Kashmir, a village is no longer a narrative – it’s just a GPS coordinate. We talk about heritage, but we have erased the physical grammar of our rural life.
When a village loses its layout, it loses its soul.
The Political Economy of Planning
Why does this continue? Because the economics of visibility favors the city. Urban projects are ribbon-cuttable, media-friendly, and politically rewarding. Rural spaces are slow and subtle – they don’t make headlines.
And so, institutions like the Srinagar Development Authority flourish, while no equivalent exists for villages. The Rural Development Department talks of schemes, not of spatial design. Panchayats manage funds, not futures. This is how the unplanned majority becomes the permanent margin.
A New Grammar of Planning
If we are serious about inclusive development, Kashmir needs a village planning revolution. Every panchayat should have a micro-masterplan – mapping its streams, karewas, green belts, shrines, and community zones. Local architects and civil engineers should design for dignity, not density.
The District Commissioners must be visionaries, not file custodians – curators of long-term rural imagination. And our planning schools must teach village morphology with the same passion as urban design. We must plan not only for where people will live, but how they will live.
The Bitter Truth
India plans its cities because they make money. It neglects its villages because they make meaning – and meaning can’t be monetized. In Kashmir, our cities make garbage – shamelessly strewn all around. But a civilization that stops planning for meaning will soon lose both. We have masterplans for where the elite will park their cars, but none for where the farmer will park his future. And until that changes, our cities will keep expanding, and our souls will keep shrinking.
