Life On The Edge Of Emergency In Kashmir

By Faizaan Bashir

I've spent the last three years wandering Kashmir's government hospitals, where every step feels caught between hope and despair.

I have watched, listened, and waited.

The scenes I've seen are flashes, bits of life that cut across numbers and reports.

They are patients and attendants living in waiting rooms thick with anxiety. The unspoken terror of illness presses against every wall.

SKIMS, the biggest hospital here, welcomes the city's emergencies with a sincerity that often goes unseen. Most doctors are committed, alert, and empathetic.

In an emergency, where seconds matter, they perform miracles under pressure. But, pressure is a constant companion.

In the triage room, two or three doctors shoulder the care of patients arriving with terminal injuries, struggling hearts, or suffocating lungs.

Each doctor is a gatekeeper between life and death, but there are moments when the system itself feels like the enemy.

Patients wait on gurneys or lean against the shoulders of their attendants. Wheelchairs glide across floors crowded with suffering. The room carries the weight of expectation and exhaustion, a crowded stage where speed meets scarcity.

The nurses disappear for minutes at a time, then reappear as if conjured, rushing to open injection vials, mix solutions, and deliver care with astonishing speed.

Their faces are calm masks over invisible strain, but the room seems stretched too thin for the demands of human life.

I have asked myself why triage cannot expand, why a few more doctors cannot be added, why patients cannot be spared some of the chaos.

These are simple calculations, ones that might alleviate unbearable pressure.

Outside triage, the echoes of suffering continue.

In the endoscopy and colonoscopy wings, assistants sometimes speak in ways that strip dignity from those already terrified. Patients arrive weary, poor, often alone. They enter these spaces hoping for relief, not confrontation. And yet the system compounds their exhaustion.

A medical store linked to the PM-JAY scheme sits half a kilometer away, forcing the sick and weak to make one more journey that their bodies cannot endure.

Attendants carry frustrations as much as patients carry illness. They smile in front of staff and curse behind their backs. Their anger is not cruelty. It is endurance under pressure, a reaction to a system that gives too little while demanding too much.

Grievance redressal exists in name only. A patient cannot battle bureaucracies while lying on a gurney. An attendant cannot argue with forms, counters, and corridors that stretch endlessly.

The suffering becomes invisible, buried under the weight of institutional indifference.

What these government hospitals lack is space, respect, and flexibility.

The architecture of care is overcrowded, inflexible, and unkind. When I compare government facilities to private hospitals, the difference is stark.

Private institutions may offer comfort and speed, but they are out of reach for most Kashmiris. Government hospitals carry abundance in infrastructure but scarcity in the elements that matter most: time, attention, and human dignity.

I cannot offer charts, statistics, or measurable variables to prove the suffering I have witnessed.

What I can offer are stories, flashes of human struggle pressed against walls that hold the echoes of cries, sighs, and whispered prayers.

Walking these corridors, I feel a mix of awe and despair: awareness of the dedication that exists alongside the crushing limitations that do not.

Government hospitals are essential, and for that, gratitude is due. Without them, life would be far harder in Kashmir.

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