Ladakh | Union territory of Ladakh

 Ladakh

Ladakh

Ladakh is a region administered by India as a union territory, and constituting a part of the larger Kashmir region, which has been the subject of dispute between India, Pakistan, and China since 1947.It is bordered by the Tibet Autonomous Region to the east, the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh to the south, both the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir and the Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan to the west, and the southwest corner of Xinjiang across the Karakoram Pass in the far north. It extends from the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram range to the north to the main Great Himalayas to the south.The eastern end, consisting of the uninhabited Aksai Chin plains, is claimed by the Indian Government as part of Ladakh, and has been under Chinese control since 1962.Until 2019, Ladakh was a region of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In August 2019, the Parliament of India passed an act by which Ladakh became a union territory on 31 October 2019.

Ladakh, large area of the northern and eastern Kashmir region, northwestern Indian subcontinent. Administratively, Ladakh is divided between Pakistan (northwest), as part of the Northern Areas, and India (southeast), as part of Ladakh union territory (until October 31, 2019, part of Jammu and Kashmir state); in addition, China administers portions of northeastern Ladakh.

 

Ladakh

Ladakh covers about 45,000 square miles (117,000 square km) and contains the Ladakh Range, which is a southeastern extension of the Karakoram Range, and the upper Indus River valley. Ladakh is one of the highest regions of the world. Its natural features consist mainly of high plains and deep valleys. The high plain predominates in the east, diminishing gradually toward the west. In southeastern Ladakh lies Rupshu, an area of large, brackish lakes with a uniform elevation of about 13,500 feet (4,100 metres). To the northwest of Rupshu lies the Zaskar Range, an inaccessible region where the people and the cattle remain indoors for much of the year because of the cold. Zaskar is drained by the Zaskar River, which, flowing northward, joins the Indus River below Leh. In the heart of Ladakh, farther to the north, cultivation by means of manuring and irrigation is practiced by farmers living in valley villages at elevations between about 9,000 and 15,000 feet (2,750 and 4,550 metres). Shepherds tend flocks in the upland valleys that are too high for cultivation. Leh, the most accessible town of Ladakh, is an important trade centre located 160 miles (260 km) east of Srinagar.

The climate of Ladakh is cold and dry. Average annual precipitation is roughly 3 inches (80 mm); fine, dry, flaked snow is frequent and sometimes falls heavily. Vegetation is confined to valleys and sheltered spots, where a stunted growth of tamarisk (genus Tamarix) shrubs, furze (also called gorse; spiny plants of the legume family), and other plants supply much-needed firewood. The principal products are wheat, barley, millet, buckwheat, peas, beans, and turnips. Woolen cloth and other textiles are the primary manufactures.

Ladakh has been contested by India and Pakistan since the dissolution of British India in 1947; after the cease-fire agreement of 1949, its southeastern portion went to India and the remainder to Pakistan. China gained control of its portion of Ladakh when its forces entered the region in the early 1960s.

Map of Ladakh

Etymology

The Tibetan and Ladakhi name La-dwags ལ་དྭགས (historically transliterated as La-dvags) means "land of high passes". Ladak is its pronunciation in several Tibetan districts, and Ladakh is a transliteration of the Hindi and Urdu spelling.

The region was previously known as Maryul.

History

Click here view to history of Ladakh

Union territory of Ladakh

Some activists from Leh in recent times called for Ladakh to be constituted as a union territory because of perceived unfair treatment by Kashmir and Ladakh's cultural differences with predominantly Muslim Kashmir valley, while some people in Kargil opposed union territory status for Ladakh.

In August 2019, a reorganisation act was passed by the Parliament of India which contained provisions to reconstitute Ladakh as a union territory, separate from the rest of Jammu and Kashmir on 31 October 2019.Under the terms of the act, the union territory is administered by a Lieutenant Governor acting on behalf of the Central Government of India and does not have an elected legislative assembly or chief minister. Each district within the union territory continues to elect an autonomous district council as done previously.

The demand for Ladakh as separate Union Territory (UT) was first raised by the parliamentarian Kushok Bakula Rinpoche around 1955, which was later carried forward by another parliamentarian Thupstan Chhewang.The former Jammu and Kashmir state use to obtain large allocation of annual funds from the union government based on the fact that the large geographical area of the Ladakh (comprising 65% of total area), but Ladakh was allocated only 2% of the state budget based on its relative population. Within the first year of the formation of Ladakh as separate union territory, its annual budget allocation has increased 4 times from ₹57 crore to ₹232 crore.

Administration

Under the terms of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, Ladakh is administered as a union territory without a legislative assembly or elected government. The head of government is a Lieutenant Governor appointed by the President of India who is assisted by civil servants of the Indian Administrative Service.

Districts

Ladakh is divided into two districts:

Name of District	Headquarters	Area (km2)	Population 2001 Census	Population 2011 Census
Kargil District	Kargil	14,036	119,307	143,388
Leh District	Leh	45,110	117,232	147,104
Total	2	59,146	236,539	290,492

Autonomous District Councils

Each district of Ladakh is administered by an autonomous district council, they are:

• Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Kargil

• Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh

The two autonomous district councils work with village panchayats to take decisions on economic development, healthcare, education, land use, taxation, and local governance which are further reviewed at the block headquarters in the presence of the chief executive councillor and executive councillors. The government of Jammu and Kashmir looks after law and order, the judicial system, communications and the higher education in the region.

The two autonomous district councils continue to exist following the formation of the union territory of Ladakh on 31 October 2019.

Region

Region, in the social sciences, a cohesive area that is homogeneous in selected defining criteria and is distinguished from neighbouring areas or regions by those criteria. It is an intellectual construct created by the selection of features relevant to a particular problem and the disregard of other features considered to be irrelevant. A region is distinguished from an area, which is usually a broader concept designating a portion of the surface of Earth. Area boundaries are arbitrary, established for convenience. Regional boundaries are determined by the homogeneity and cohesiveness of the section.

Regions may be nodal, defined by the organization of activity about some central place (e.g., a town and its hinterland, or tributary area), or uniform, defined by the homogeneous distribution of some phenomena within it (e.g., a tropical rainforest).

Regions may be defined in terms of single or multiple features or in terms that approach the total content of human occupancy of an area. The most common features in social science are ethnic, cultural, or linguistic (Provence), climatic or topographical (the Tennessee Valley), industrial or urban (the Ruhr), economic specialization (the Cotton Belt of North America), administrative units (standard government regions in Great Britain), and international political areas (the Middle East).

The concept of region is currently used in analysis, planning, and administration of many national and international public programs. Regionalism, or regional consciousness, the ideological correlate of the concept that develops from a sense of identity within the region, is important in many historical, political, and sociological analyses.

Culture

Ladakhi culture is similar to Tibetan culture.

Cuisine

 Ladakhi food has much in common with Tibetan food, the most prominent foods being thukpa (noodle soup) and tsampa, known in Ladakhi as ngampe (roasted barley flour). Edible without cooking, tsampa makes useful trekking food. A dish that is strictly Ladakhi is skyu, a heavy pasta dish with root vegetables. As Ladakh moves toward a cash-based economy, foods from the plains of India are becoming more common. As in other parts of Central Asia, tea in Ladakh is traditionally made with strong green tea, butter, and salt. It is mixed in a large churn and known as gurgur cha, after the sound it makes when mixed. Sweet tea (cha ngarmo) is common now, made in the Indian style with milk and sugar. Most of the surplus barley that is produced is fermented into chang, an alcoholic beverage drunk especially on festive occasions.

Coisine of Ladakh

Thukpa

Momos

Music and dance

The music of Ladakhi Buddhist monastic festivals, like Tibetan music, often involves religious chanting in Tibetan as an integral part of the religion. These chants are complex, often recitations of sacred texts or in celebration of various festivals. Yang chanting, performed without metrical timing, is accompanied by resonant drums and low, sustained syllables. Religious mask dances are an important part of Ladakh's cultural life. Hemis monastery, a leading centre of the Drukpa tradition of Buddhism, holds an annual masked dance festival, as do all major Ladakhi monasteries. The dances typically narrate a story of the fight between good and evil, ending with the eventual victory of the former. Weaving is an important part of traditional life in eastern Ladakh. Both women and men weave, on different looms.

Sport

The most popular sport in Ladakh is ice hockey, which is played only on natural ice generally mid-December through mid-February. Cricket is also very popular.

Archery is a traditional sport in Ladakh, and many villages hold archery festivals, which are as much about traditional dancing, drinking and gambling, as they are about the sport. The sport is conducted with strict etiquette, to the accompaniment of the music of surna and daman (shehnai and drum). Polo, the other traditional sport of Ladakh, is indigenous to Baltistan and Gilgit, and was probably introduced into Ladakh in the mid-17th century by King Singge Namgyal, whose mother was a Balti princess.

Polo, popular among the Baltis, is an annual affair in Drass region of Kargil district.

The Ladakh Marathon is a high-altitude marathon held in Leh every year since 2012. Held at a height of 11,500 to 17,618 feet (3,505 to 5,370 m), it is one of the world's highest marathons.

Education

According to the 2001 census, the overall literacy rate in Leh District is 62% (72% for males and 50% for females), and in Kargil District 58% (74% for males and 41% for females). Traditionally there was little or nothing by way of formal education except in the monasteries. Usually, one son from every family was obliged to master the Tibetan script in order to read the holy books.

The Moravian Mission opened a school in Leh in October 1889, and the Wazir-i Wazarat (ex officio Joint Commissioner with a British officer) of Baltistan and Ladakh ordered that every family with more than one child should send one of them to school. This order met with great resistance from the local people who feared that the children would be forced to convert to Christianity. The school taught Tibetan, Urdu, English, Geography, Sciences, Nature study, Arithmetic, Geometry and Bible study. It is still in existence today. The first local school to provide western education was opened by a local Society called "Lamdon Social Welfare Society" in 1973. Later, with support from Dalai Lama and some international organisations, the school, now known as Lamdon Model Senior Secondary School, has grown to accommodate approximately two thousand pupils in several branches. It prides itself on preserving Ladakhi tradition and culture.

Schools are well distributed throughout Ladakh but 75% of them provide only primary education. 65% of children attend school, but absenteeism of both students and teachers remains high. In both districts the failure rate at school-leaving level (class X) had for many years been around 85–95%, while of those managing to scrape through, barely half succeeded in qualifying for college entrance (class XII). Before 1993, students were taught in Urdu until they were 14, after which the medium of instruction shifted to English.

In 1994 the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) launched Operation New Hope (ONH), a campaign to provide "culturally appropriate and locally relevant education" and make government schools more functional and effective.

University of Ladakh and Eliezer Joldan Memorial College, a government degree college, enables students to pursue higher education without having to leave Ladakh.

In December 2019, the union minister of state for home affairs Mr G Kishan Reddy, in a written response has stated in Parliament that the Government of India has approved to establish a Medical College and National Research Institute for Sowa-Rigpa in the district of Leh.

Economy

The land is irrigated by a system of channels which funnel water from the ice and snow of the mountains. The principal crops are barley and wheat. Rice was previously a luxury in the Ladakhi diet, but, subsidised by the government, has now become a cheap staple.

Naked barley (Ladakhi: nas, Urdu: grim) was traditionally a staple crop all over Ladakh. Growing times vary considerably with altitude. The extreme limit of cultivation is at Korzok, on the Tso-moriri lake, at 4,600 m (15,100 ft), which has what are widely considered to be the highest fields in the world.

A minority of Ladakhi people were also employed as merchants and caravan traders, facilitating trade in textiles, carpets, dyestuffs and narcotics between Punjab and Xinjiang. However, since the Chinese Government closed the borders between Tibet Autonomous Region and Ladakh, this international trade has completely dried up.

Indus river flowing in the Ladakh region is endowed with vast hydropower potential. Solar and wind power potentials are also substantial. Though the region is a remote hilly area without all-weather roads, the area is also rich in limestone deposits to manufacture cement from the locally available cheap electricity for various construction needs.

Since 1974, the Indian Government has encouraged a shift in trekking and other tourist activities from the troubled Kashmir region to the relatively unaffected areas of Ladakh. Although tourism employs only 4% of Ladakh's working population, it now accounts for 50% of the region's GNP.

This era is recorded in Arthur Neves The Tourist's Guide to Kashmir, Ladakh, and Skardo, first published in 1911.

Transportation

There are about 1,800 km (1,100 mi) of roads in Ladakh of which 800 km (500 mi) are surfaced.The majority of roads in Ladakh are looked after by the Border Roads Organisation. The third road to Ladakh is the Nimmu-Padam-Darcha road, which is under construction.

There is an airport in Leh, Kushok Bakula Rimpochee Airport, from which there are daily flights to Delhi and weekly flights to Srinagar and Jammu. There are two airstrips at Daulat Beg Oldie and Fukche for military transport. The airport at Kargil, Kargil Airport, was intended for civilian flights but is currently is used by the Indian Army. The airport is a political issue for the locals who argue that the airport should serve its original purpose, i.e., should open up for civilian flights. Since past few years the Indian Air Force has been operating AN-32 air courier service to transport the locals during the winter seasons to Jammu, Srinagar and Chandigarh. A private aeroplane company Air Mantra landed a 17-seater aircraft at the airport, in presence of dignitaries like the Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, marking the first ever landing by a civilian airline company at Kargil Airport.