A Rare Bright Spot in Kashmir’s Public Healthcare

Nobody wakes up wanting to visit a hospital.

- Sahil Manzoor Bhatti

We all hope to stay healthy, avoid doctors, live our whole lives without crossing those sliding doors. But bodies break on their own schedule. Bones snap on icy roads, joints wear out after years of hard labour, and tumors grow silently until they demand attention.When that moment hits, your local hospital becomes the only thing standing between you and disaster.

That hospital has too often been a place of last resort in Kashmir. Poor families here face brutal choices. Private clinics charge money most people simply do not have. Travelling to AIIMS Delhi costs more than a year of wages.

So people wait, and suffer at home. ‘They hope the pain goes away on its own. Sometimes it does, but often it gets worse.

This is why the new 120-bed orthopedic block at the Bone and Joint Hospital in Barzulla matters so much. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah opened the building in July 2025. I visited last month when a relative needed care. I walked in expecting the usual Kashmiri public hospital experience: crowded corridors, broken equipment, the particular exhaustion of places asked to do too much with too little. Instead I found something else entirely.