Fazal Ali Saadi
Gilgit-Baltistan has changed profoundly since 1947, and at extraordinary pace during the last three decades. Improvement in communication, telecommunication infrastructure, education, trade and tourism have impacted many aspects of life. Yet a recent journey through Ghanche, Skardu, Gilgit and Ghizer left me asking harder questions: What have we gained? What are we losing? Who is bearing the cost of this transformation?
I returned to Gilgit-Baltistan recently after spending two years outside the country. Distance changes the way we see home. Changes that feel ordinary when we live with them daily become more visible after an absence.
During this visit, I travelled through Ghanche, Skardu, Astore, Gilgit and Ghizer Districts. I visited more than ten schools, walked through local markets and villages, travelled the roads and spoke with teachers, parents, traders and local residents. What struck me most was not just how much Gilgit-Baltistan had changed, but how uneasy many people seemed about the direction of that change.
There were more shops, more vehicles, more buildings and more consumer goods. Yet conversations kept returning to the rising cost of food, education, transport, housing and everyday life. The markets looked busier, but many people sounded no more secure. There was more consumption, and more anxiety about how to pay for it. This feeling stayed with me as I moved from one district to another. It reminded me of some lines I had written:
GB, we are losing you–
not in one great fall,
but field by field,
stream by stream,
orchard by orchard,
stone by stone.
The words may seem to many emotional, but the changes behind them are material and measurable. To understand what has happened, we need to look further back than the last twenty-five years. The Gilgit-Baltistan that emerged after 1947 was overwhelmingly agro-pastoral and isolated and poor society in cash terms. Roads were few, health services were negligible, higher education was difficult to access and many valleys would remain cut off for long periods. Farming depended heavily on weather and human labour. Women carried a particularly large share of unpaid agro-pastoral and household work. Older political arrangements were also unequal. Princely rule, taxation, class hierarchy and limited rights should not be romanticised.
But the economy was collective, organised, and egalitarian in stark contrast to today’s. Most households would produce a significant part of what they consumed. Land meant food before it meant real estate. Fields produced wheat, maize, barley, potatoes, vegetables and fodder. Orchards produced apricots, apples, mulberries, cherries and walnuts. Cattle, sheep and goats provided milk, meat, wool and manure. Families dried fruit and stored grain for winter. Irrigation channels depended on collective labour. Grazing areas, forests, water and village institutions formed part of an interconnected mountain economy.
People had little cash, but many families retained direct access to the basic means of survival: land, water, livestock, seed, family labour and shared resources. The system was not prosperous and it was vulnerable to crop failure, harsh winters and isolation, but people were not as dependent on the market for every basic need.
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The opening of roads changed this profoundly. The Karakoram Highway reduced geographical isolation and connected Gilgit-Baltistan far more closely to the rest of Pakistan. Government institutions expanded, education spread, health services improved and salaried employment increased. Organisations such as the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme later strengthened village organisations, irrigation, savings, agriculture and local infrastructure.
These changes brought enormous benefits. A road could mean access to a hospital. Education could allow the child of a farmer to become a teacher, doctor or engineer. Electricity reduced physical labour. Communications connected families. Markets made previously unavailable goods accessible. There is no sensible argument for returning to the isolation and deprivation of the past.
But roads do more than connect places. They connect economic systems. Once transport becomes cheaper, imported goods compete with local production. Labour can leave villages more easily. Tourism expands. Roadside land becomes commercially valuable. Construction follows. A piece of agricultural land that may produce only a modest annual income can suddenly become worth millions of rupees as property.
This is where the character of development begins to change. Over roughly the last twenty-five years, Gilgit-Baltistan has moved much faster towards an economy centred on property, tourism, construction, salaried employment, private transport and commercial consumption. Marxist political economy offers a useful way of understanding this transition through the distinction between use value and exchange value.
A field has use value because it produces food. It has exchange value because it can be sold. When the market value of the land rises far above what farming can earn, exchange value begins to dominate use value.
That is increasingly visible across Gilgit-Baltistan. Research published in GeoJournal on Hunza, Ghizer and Nagar found major reductions in cultivated land among surveyed households between 2014 and 2019, alongside significant increases in commercial land use. Researchers linked the change to tourism, urbanisation, commercial construction and rising land values.
My own memory of land prices illustrates the scale of the shift. Around the late 2000s, land in parts of Danyore near Gilgit could be discussed in hundreds of thousands of rupees per kanal. Today, plots in commercially attractive locations can command many millions. This is not a formal property-price index, but anyone who has watched the market over the past two decades recognises the direction of change.
For the individual landowner, selling may be perfectly rational. Farming generates little cash, while selling a piece of land may finance children’s education, migration, a house or a business. The problem begins when thousands of individually rational decisions produce a collectively damaging result.
A field disappears. Another becomes a house. An irrigation channel is blocked. An orchard becomes a hotel. The hotel brings traffic. Traffic attracts shops. Commercial activity raises nearby land values. Higher land values make farming even less attractive. More land is sold.
The process feeds itself. The landowner receives the sale price, but society carries much of the long-term cost through reduced food production, congestion, loss of open space, pressure on water and destruction of landscape.
I saw different stages of this process during my recent journey. Gilgit and Skardu continue to spread. Gahkuch is changing quickly. Construction follows main roads, and in many places agricultural land that once separated settlements is gradually being filled with concrete.
We are creating urbanisation without creating functioning cities. A city requires more than buildings. It needs sewerage, drainage, drinking water, waste collection, public transport, footpaths, parks, parking management, land-use planning and capable local government. Yet in much of Gilgit-Baltistan, private construction has moved much faster than public infrastructure. The building is private, but many of its costs become public.
Transport shows the same contradiction. Non-Custom-Paid vehicles made car ownership possible for families that could never have afforded conventional imported vehicles. For an individual household, this provides real mobility. At the collective level, however, Gilgit-Baltistan has allowed private cars to substitute for public transport.
When there is no dependable public transport, people buy cars. As more cars enter the roads, congestion increases. Roads become parking spaces. Town centres become increasingly difficult to move through. Those who can afford another vehicle become even more dependent on private transport.
The wealthy can own several vehicles. A low-income worker, student, older person or someone unable to drive remains dependent on taxis, irregular vans or relatives. A genuinely developed transport system should give freedom to the person who does not own a car.
Tourism follows a similar political economy. It has brought badly needed income and employment. Hotels, guides, restaurants, drivers, shops and many local businesses depend on visitors. Gilgit-Baltistan recorded close to one million domestic tourist visits in 2024, while foreign arrivals remained only a small fraction of that number.
The problem is not tourism. It is the assumption that ever larger visitor numbers automatically mean successful development. Tourism often produces private income while shifting many of its costs onto the public. A hotel earns from rooms, but the community shares the pressure on water and electricity. Restaurants and shops make sales, but municipalities and communities deal with much of the waste. Tour operators earn from moving visitors while everybody shares the resulting congestion and pollution. Property owners benefit from rising land values while younger families can find local land increasingly unaffordable.
This is especially important in a fragile mountain environment. The meaningful questions are not simply how many tourists arrived, but who owns the hotels, who supplies their food, what workers earn, how much local produce they buy, how much water and electricity they consume, where their waste goes and how much of the tourism income remains within the community.
Agriculture concerns me even more. Travelling through markets, I saw shelves full of packaged foods, bottled drinks, plastics and goods transported from hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. Yet outside these markets are fields that are no longer cultivated, orchards being divided for construction and villages where fewer families keep livestock.
In some places, even families that still own agricultural land no longer cultivate it themselves. They depend on hired labour, which has itself become difficult to find. In fruit-growing areas, families can struggle to find enough people even to pick the crop.
Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation may have had much less cash, but households commonly produced part of their own food. Today a family can have a higher cash income and yet be more dependent on the market for basic food. This creates an economic illusion.
Imagine a household that once kept a cow and produced its own milk. Very little of that production appeared in monetary statistics. If the family sells the cow, stops growing fodder and begins buying packaged milk every day, measured market activity increases. More money changes hands. But the family has not necessarily become more food secure. Something it once produced has become something it must purchase.
The same process affects labour. Young people understandably do not want to spend their lives doing difficult agricultural work for very little return. Education has widened their ambitions. Government employment, tourism, construction and services offer cash income and greater social status.
So young labour leaves farming. Families keep fewer livestock. Less manure reaches the fields. Irrigation channels receive less collective maintenance. Productivity declines. Families buy more food from outside. Farming becomes still less attractive.
Again, the process reinforces itself. The answer is not to tell young people to abandon education and return to an imagined traditional past. Farming must provide a dignified income if society expects people to continue it. Mountain agriculture needs small machinery, greenhouses, dairy cooperatives, cold storage, food processing, better markets and institutional support. Hotels, schools, hospitals and government institutions should create demand for locally produced food. Tourism should strengthen agriculture rather than displace it.
My school visits exposed another contradiction. Government schools often employ trained, qualified and comparatively well-paid teachers, and many have reasonable buildings and facilities. Yet public confidence in them has weakened.
ASER’s 2023 rural survey found that 63 per cent of enrolled children aged six to sixteen attended government schools, while 37 per cent were in non-state institutions. The non-state share had risen by ten percentage points from 2021. ASER also found stronger learning outcomes among private-school pupils on some literacy and numeracy measures, so parents’ concerns cannot simply be dismissed.
Yet government teachers often compare well in formal qualifications. The puzzle is why families with modest incomes continue to spend heavily on private education even where the public system has trained staff and charges no fees.
Part of the answer lies in perception and class.
Private schools do not sell only classroom instruction. They sell English, discipline, status and the promise of social mobility. In some cases, even government teachers send their own children to private institutions. This sends a powerful signal to other parents.
When families with greater influence withdraw from public schools, they also have less direct interest in demanding their improvement. The private sector expands, while government schools increasingly become associated with families that have fewer alternatives.
What begins as individual choice can eventually harden into class separation.
The answer is not to attack private schools. It is to rebuild the public system to a standard where families do not feel that paying private fees is necessary for their children’s future.
Yet the strongest impression I carried from this visit was not about roads, schools or buildings. It was the level of worry and discontent.
People repeatedly spoke about prices, employment, children’s futures, land and uncertainty. Gilgit-Baltistan is more connected to the world than at any point in its history, but this connection also brings new expectations.
A young person can study for sixteen years, watch other people’s lives continuously through a smartphone and emerge with legitimate expectations of secure work and dignity. But the formal economy cannot provide good jobs for everyone. When aspirations rise much faster than opportunities, social pressure follows.
This cannot be separated from growing concern about suicide, violence against women, sexual harassment, child abuse and suspicious deaths. A peer-reviewed analysis of police records from three districts recorded 340 suicides between 2012 and March 2022. Fifty-three per cent of the recorded cases involved females and 40 per cent involved people below the age of twenty. Seven cases initially recorded as suicides were later reclassified as homicides.
Human-rights reporting has also continued to document so-called honour killings, harassment, child abuse and weaknesses in protection services.
We should not claim that modernisation directly causes suicide, violence or abuse. These problems also existed in older society, and many were hidden by silence and stigma. But rapid change can create new pressures while making older injustices more visible.
Women can become highly educated while entering households where power relations have changed much more slowly. Children experience greater mobility and digital exposure while child-protection institutions remain weak. Young men and women develop higher expectations while employment remains insecure.
Traditional forms of community control are weakening before modern systems of counselling, social work, safeguarding and justice have become strong enough to replace them. In Gilgit-Baltistan, many such institutions remain weak or barely developed.
This is institutional lag: society changes faster than the institutions needed to protect people within it. Above all this hangs the growing threat of climate change. Over recent decades, people across Gilgit-Baltistan have witnessed flash floods, landslides, cloudbursts and glacial lake outburst floods damaging homes, roads, bridges, agricultural land and, in some cases, entire settlements. The regional Climate Change Strategy itself acknowledges increasing climate and disaster risks. UNDP has warned of thousands of glacial lakes across northern Pakistan, with dozens considered potentially dangerous.
This is fundamentally a question of climate justice. The communities of Gilgit-Baltistan contributed very little to the global emissions driving climate change, yet they live on the frontline of its consequences.
But global responsibility does not remove local responsibility. During this visit I again noticed construction creeping into river belts and flood-prone land. The river corridor around Gilgit city alone shows how human settlement continues to move towards spaces that water has occupied for generations.
When land becomes expensive, people search for cheaper places to build. Encroachment follows riverbanks and marginal land. Construction narrows natural channels. Roads cut unstable slopes. Vegetation disappears.
Then a climate-driven event arrives. A hazard becomes a disaster partly because of where and how we have built. Traditional mountain knowledge often understood this very simply: where floods had travelled, where avalanches came down, where streams shifted and where houses should not be built.
The mountains have not betrayed us.
We cut the trees,
blocked the waterways,
weakened the slopes
and built where rivers remember.
This does not transfer responsibility for global climate change to local communities. It makes a different point. Climate change increases the hazard; bad development increases exposure.
A flood becomes more destructive when we build in its path. A cloudburst becomes more dangerous when drainage is blocked. A river becomes more destructive when construction narrows its channel. A slope becomes more unstable when vegetation disappears or roads cut into it without adequate protection.
Climate disasters also reveal class inequality. A wealthy household may have savings, another home, transport and connections that help it recover. A poor family can lose its house, livestock, field and entire productive base in a single event. Climate change affects everyone, but it does not affect everyone equally.
Looking at Gilgit-Baltistan since 1947, therefore, I do not see a simple story of decline, nor a simple story of progress. Earlier generations faced isolation, poverty, hard labour and limited services. Later generations built roads, expanded education, improved health services and opened connections to the rest of the world. These were genuine achievements.
The last twenty-five years have inherited those achievements but also created a different set of contradictions. We reduced geographical isolation but became more dependent on distant markets. We gained roads but did not build public transport. We expanded education while losing confidence in public schools. We gained access to food markets while weakening parts of our own food-producing economy. Tourism brought income while consuming some of the landscape on which tourism itself depends. Property values created wealth for some while making land unaffordable for others. Digital connectivity widened horizons while insecurity about work and the future remained.
The deeper problem is that markets have expanded much faster than the institutions meant to govern them. Construction has moved faster than planning. Cars have moved faster than public transport. Tourism has moved faster than waste management. Commercial food has moved faster than food regulation. Private schooling has moved faster than public-school reform. Climate hazards have moved faster than resilient planning. Social change has moved faster than mental-health, child-protection and women’s protection systems.
This is why the market cannot be allowed to decide the future of Gilgit-Baltistan by itself. Markets understand price extremely well. They are much less capable of recognising value that cannot easily be bought or sold. The property market knows the price of a kanal of land. It cannot measure the value of the food that land might produce for generations.
The tourism market knows what a hotel room can earn in one season. It cannot fully price the orchard, water or landscape sacrificed to build it.
Private education knows the price of a school fee. It cannot measure the social value of a good public school where children of different classes learn together.
The automobile market knows the price of a car. It does not automatically charge its owner for the congestion and pollution imposed on everyone else.
Development, therefore, requires democratic planning. This does not mean that government should own or control every farm, shop or hotel. It means recognising that some things are too important to allow money alone to decide their future. Agricultural land requires protection. Water is a common resource. Transport is a public service. Education is a social right. Food security is strategic. Workers deserve decent wages. Women and children need effective protection. Rivers need space to flow. Local communities must have a meaningful voice over land and natural resources.
The most important contradiction I carried away from this visit is simple: Gilgit-Baltistan appears materially richer than the place many of us knew twenty or thirty years ago, yet many people do not seem correspondingly more secure.
That should concern us more than another celebration of tourist numbers vehicle ownership, property prices, kilometres of road or for that matter uselessly discussing about tourist dancing in Hunza.
Development should ultimately reduce insecurity and inequality. It should make dignified work easier to find, farming worth continuing, housing affordable, public education trustworthy, mobility possible without private car ownership, women and children safer, food healthier and communities more resilient to floods and GLOFs.
It should allow the next generation to inherit land that produces something other than rent.
The apricot tree still remains. The irrigation channel remains. Farmers are still planting. Teachers are still teaching. Communities continue to rebuild after disasters. Women are demanding a stronger voice. Young people still care deeply about their valleys. The knowledge of the mountains has not disappeared.
So loss is not yet fate. But preservation cannot depend on nostalgia. It requires political choices. Gilgit-Baltistan does not have to choose between the poverty of the past and uncontrolled capitalism in the present. It can choose modern infrastructure while protecting agricultural land; tourism with environmental limits; markets with effective regulation; private enterprise alongside strong public services; modern education alongside local knowledge; and economic growth combined with social protection and democratic control of land, water and natural resources.
The next twenty-five years may determine whether that possibility survives. Gilgit-Baltistan is not being lost in one dramatic moment. It is being decided field by field, stream by stream, orchard by orchard and stone by stone.
The question beneath all these choices remains the same: Development for what? For whom? And at whose cost?
Fazal Ali Saadi, hailing from Gilgit-Baltistan’s Ishkoman Valley, is a development practitioner and researcher interested in understanding development-induced challenges of poverty and inequality.
The High Asia Herald is a member of High Asia Media Group — a window to High Asia and Central Asia