Every monsoon season now arrives with the same script: a landslide, a multi-day closure of the Srinagar-Jammu highway, stranded trucks of perishable produce, and official assurances that permanent fixes are under way. This week's closure near Ramban was, by most measures, an ordinary one — cleared within days, no reported casualties. That it counts as an ordinary event at all is the problem.
Slope stabilisation along this corridor has been promised in successive budget cycles for over a decade. Retaining walls get built in sections, funding lapses, and the next monsoon finds the same vulnerable stretches unprotected. The economic cost of each closure, in spoiled produce and lost trading days, is measurable and repeated. The engineering solutions are not mysterious.
What is missing is sustained, multi-year funding insulated from the annual budget cycle, and public reporting on which stretches remain unprotected. Kashmir's only reliable winter road link deserves better than a yearly gamble.
