Ghost Bunkers

Built without design thinking or community input, Kashmir's border shelters are failing the very people they're meant to protect.

- Dr. Raja Muzaffar Bhat

The concrete structure looked more like a grain storage shed than an emergency shelter. I bent low to enter, stepping into a damp, air-less room with walls cold to the touch. Inside, there were no beds, no lights, no toilet — just a bunker, by official definition.

“This is what we got,” said Laldeen Khatana, a former village head here near the Line of Control. “But would you hide your children in a place like this?”

I stood in that space longer than I needed to, trying to imagine a mother with three children crouched in the dark, the ground above shaking with the sound of shells. I couldn’t. Not for more than a minute.

Over the past few months, I’ve traveled across forward areas of Jammu and Kashmir, from Uri in the north to Poonch in the south, to see what "civilian protection" looks like in a region where shelling is part of life.

The government of India, under a central scheme, has spent crores building thousands of bunkers in villages along the LoC. But many of these structures, I found, are ill-conceived, poorly built, and worst of all, unused.

In village after village, I asked the same question: Do you use the bunkers?

The answer, almost always, was a shake of the head.

In Degwar, a village in Poonch district, I met a family who told me that during a recent shelling, they fled their government-assigned bunker because a snake had entered through an uncovered drainage pipe.

“It was raining,” the woman said. “The bunker was flooding. The children were crying. And then we saw the snake. We ran.”