Jammu and Kashmir has built more than three lakh pucca homes for poor rural families and delivers free rations, pensions, gas and health cover to the doorstep. In Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, relief arrives only after deadly strikes, and Islamabad switched off health cards for nearly two years.
Across Rajouri and Poonch, tens of thousands of poor families who once lived in kutcha homes now sleep beneath concrete roofs. By March 2025, Jammu and Kashmir had completed 3,04,544 houses under the rural arm of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, India’s housing scheme for the poor. Rajouri alone accounts for 55,829 of them, Poonch for 46,752 and Ramban for 31,714.
Across the Line of Control, families in Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) have learned a harsher lesson: the state helps only when they shut down the streets.
*A Roof for Every Family*
Jammu and Kashmir builds fast and finishes what it starts. Between 2021–22 and 2025–26, it sanctioned 1,98,913 rural houses and completed 1,92,983 of them, about 97 per cent, using ₹3,212 crore of central and Union Territory funds. New Delhi has now raised its allocation for the extended phase to 3,41,644 houses.
*A Safety Net That Reaches the Doorstep*
The support continues inside the house. Jammu and Kashmir’s public distribution system now serves 68.5 lakh people, more than 1 lakh more than a year earlier. In 2025, its cabinet approved 10 kg of free ration per person and 200 units of free electricity a month for every household in the Antyodaya Anna Yojana, the scheme for the poorest of the poor. It raised monthly pensions for more than 10 lakh elderly people, widows, divorcees and people with disabilities to between ₹1,250 and ₹2,000, depending on age, and lifted marriage assistance for girls from the poorest families from ₹50,000 to ₹75,000.
The 2026–27 budget goes further. It gives the poorest households six free gas cylinders a year, pays orphans who have lost both parents ₹4,000 to ₹6,000 a month and waives school and college fees for students from the poorest families. It adds 127 new anganwadi centres for young children and extends free bus travel from women to people with disabilities.
Health cover underpins it all. Since December 2020, the AB-PMJAY SEHAT scheme has given every family in Jammu and Kashmir free treatment worth up to ₹5 lakh a year, making it the first state or Union Territory in India to cover all its residents. The scheme also extends to government employees, pensioners and their families.
*PoJK: No Net, Only Strikes*
PoJK offers no such net. In 2024–25, its government set aside just Rs 53 million for social welfare and women’s development, about Rs 12 for each of its 4.39 million residents, or roughly four US cents. Its official yearbook records no figures at all for old-age pensions or welfare beneficiaries, and it does not even record what its houses are made of.
Relief comes only after bloodshed. In May 2024, PoJK’s residents paid Rs 3,100 for a 40-kg bag of flour. Islamabad found Rs 23 billion to cut the price to Rs 2,000, but only after the territory shut down and the clashes turned deadly. In Muzaffarabad, Pakistani Rangers killed three protesters. In June 2026, the pattern repeated: after a 20-day shutdown and at least 24 deaths, the governments announced a Rs 72-billion package for cheaper flour and electricity.
Even basic health cover vanished. Islamabad suspended health card services for residents of PoJK and Gilgit-Baltistan in March 2024 and restored them only in January 2026, leaving families to pay for hospital care themselves for nearly two years.
*Promises Buried in Rubble*
PoJK’s neglect stretches back two decades. Twenty years after the 2005 earthquake flattened Muzaffarabad, thousands of children still study in the open because their school buildings remain unfinished. One contractor completed his work six years ago and still awaits payment, and Pakistan’s reconstruction authority blames the country’s financial crisis.
Gilgit-Baltistan fares no better. When cloudbursts and floods struck in the summer of 2025, its disaster authority paid out just Rs 14 million in compensation across the entire region.
*A State That Delivers*
Welfare reveals whether a government sees its poorest citizens. Jammu and Kashmir builds them houses, fills their ration bags, pays their pensions, lights their homes, waives their children’s fees and insures their health. PoJK makes them march, strike and bury their dead before it lowers the price of bread, and it leaves its children studying under the sky two decades after an earthquake. One side offers a safety net. The other offers a fight for survival.
