Jammu & Kashmir After Article 370: What Does the Data Say?
Six years after the abrogation of Article 370, official statistics tell a story more complicated than either its critics or its defenders admit. This article draws on data and analysis originally published in The Hindu’s data journalism report, “Did reducing Jammu and Kashmir to a UT and abrogating its special status make a difference?” by Sambavi Parthasarathy, Pon Vasanth B.A., and Sachin Swaraj (August 6, 2026). The interpretation and framing below are my own.
On August 5, 2019, the Indian government revoked Jammu & Kashmir’s special constitutional status under Article 370 and Article 35A, and reorganised the state into two Union Territories. It was presented as a decisive rupture–the end of an “anomaly” that would unlock security, investment, and integration in equal measure. Six years on, the political debate over that decision remains as polarised as ever. But debate over intentions is not the same as evidence of outcomes. What do the numbers–on the economy, education, employment, industry, and civil liberties –actually show?
A modest, uneven economy
Jammu & Kashmir’s Gross State Domestic Product grew from roughly ₹0.97 lakh crore in 2015–16 to about ₹1.44 lakh crore in 2024–25, at constant prices. That is real growth, but it is neither smooth nor especially fast. The economy contracted around 2019–20 –the year of the reorganisation itself, compounded by a prolonged communications shutdown –and again during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–21. A rebound followed, but growth slowed sharply to about 1.4% in 2024–25. In other words, the region has recovered lost ground rather than accelerated past it. An economy that dips twice in five years before settling into low single-digit growth is not evidence of transformation; it is evidence of resilience under strain.
Security has genuinely improved –but the human cost persists
This is where the government’s case is strongest. Terror-related incidents, which stood at 586 in 2010 and peaked at 597 in 2018, had fallen to 94 by mid-2026. That is a substantial and real decline, and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than explained away. Whatever one’s view of the constitutional change, fewer incidents of violence is an unambiguous good for the people who live through them. At the same time, a lower frequency of incidents is not the same as the disappearance of conflict. Violence that becomes rarer but not absent still exacts a toll on the families and communities it touches, and the data on detentions and undertrials (below) suggests the state’s security apparatus has not correspondingly relaxed its footprint.
Higher education: expansion on paper, contraction in practice
Between 2019–20 and 2021–22, university and college enrolment held close to four lakh students. By 2023–24, it had fallen to around 3.52 lakh, and the Gross Enrolment Ratio declined from 25.1% to 21.5% over the same period. This is a striking finding, because it runs counter to the narrative of expanding opportunity that typically accompanies claims of “integration” and “development.” Infrastructure –new campuses, new institutions –can expand even as actual participation contracts, if the underlying conditions (economic security, mobility, local confidence in institutions) do not improve in tandem. Enrolment is, in the end, a vote of confidence cast by young people and their families. A declining vote deserves more scrutiny than it has received.
Employment, and a stark gender divide
The unemployment data is the most sociologically revealing part of this picture. In 2023–24, urban unemployment stood at 272 per thousand among women, compared with 48 per thousand among men –a gap of nearly six times. In rural areas, the gap was smaller in absolute terms but still substantial: 71 per thousand for women against 35 for men. These are not marginal disparities; they describe two starkly different labour markets operating side by side, one for men and a far more exclusionary one for women, particularly in urban areas. Any account of “normalisation” in Jammu & Kashmir that does not reckon with this gendered unemployment crisis is, at best, incomplete.
Industrialisation without proportionate jobs
The number of registered factories rose from 626 in 2009–10 to 1,028 in 2023–24 –a genuine expansion of industrial presence. But the workforce inside those factories has not kept pace. Employment peaked at around 59,000 workers in 2016–17 and 2018–19, then declined to approximately 52,000 by 2023–24. More units, in other words, have not translated into more jobs. This is a familiar pattern in Indian industrial policy more broadly–capital-intensive investment that expands the count of enterprises without proportionately expanding the workforce absorbed by them –but it sits uneasily alongside political claims that removing Article 370 would open the floodgates of investment and employment.
Civil liberties: the most contested terrain
The numbers here are the ones most likely to divide readers, and they deserve to be stated plainly rather than argued away. Internet shutdowns peaked at 116 in 2020 before declining. Cases under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act rose from 161 in 2016 to 371 in 2022, before falling to 215 in 2024. The number of undertrials rose from 1,959 in 2016 to over 4,500 in recent years, and detainees reached 667 in 2024. Independent indices such as Freedom House have recorded a deterioration in the region’s civil liberties and political rights scores after 2019. None of this is proof of any particular political conclusion. But it is proof that the post-2019 period has coincided with an intensification, not a relaxation, of the state’s coercive and legal apparatus –a fact that sits alongside, not opposed to, the genuine decline in terror incidents. Both things can be true at once, and a serious account of the region has to hold them together rather than choosing the one that fits a preferred narrative.
Public investment: rising, but not transformative
Capital outlay increased from about ₹8,286 crore in 2016–17 to ₹12,060 crore in 2024–25. This is a meaningful rise in absolute terms, and it reflects a real policy commitment to public investment in the region. But the year-on-year trajectory has been uneven, and –set against the employment and enrolment figures above –it suggests that higher spending has not yet translated into commensurate gains in jobs or broad-based economic opportunity. Investment is a necessary condition for transformation; it is evidently not a sufficient one.
Beyond the political headline
Taken together, the data resists a single storyline. Security indicators have improved substantially. GSDP and capital expenditure have both grown. But higher education enrolment has fallen, industrial employment has stagnated even as the number of factories has grown, and unemployment –especially among urban women –remains severe. Meanwhile, indicators of state coercion, from UAPA cases to undertrial numbers, have moved in the opposite direction from what a narrative of straightforward “normalisation” would predict.
This is precisely the trouble with reducing a constitutional and political transformation of this scale to a single verdict –success or failure, good or bad. The more honest reading is that formal-institutional change (a new administrative status, new laws, new investment schemes) and lived, everyday change (a job, a place in college, freedom of movement and expression) do not automatically move together. They can, and in this case seemingly do, diverge.
Six years on, the more useful question is not whether removing Article 370 was, in the abstract, right or wrong. It is whether the everyday lives of the people of Jammu & Kashmir –their access to jobs, education, security, and civil freedoms –have genuinely improved, and for whom. On that question, the data offers a mixed answer at best, and a warning against mistaking the volume of political claims for the depth of actual change.