Seven Districts, Two Councils: Ladakh's Arithmetic Problem After Reorganisation

Article summary

The creation of five new districts in Ladakh in April 2026 — Drass, Sham, Nubra, Changthang and Zanskar — has taken the Union Territory from two districts to seven, and reopened a structural question about how it is governed. Ladakh has two Autonomous Hill Development Councils, at Leh and Kargil, constituted under the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council Act, 1997, whose Section 3 provides the statutory basis. On paper these councils handle district planning, budgets, development schemes, management of council land and collection of local taxes; in practice their authority is widely reported to have diminished since Ladakh became a Union Territory without a legislature under the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019. The arithmetic now creates its own problem: with seven districts and two councils, five districts have no council of their own, raising the question of whether the council model should be extended to all seven. Civil society groups — the Apex Body Leh and the Kargil Democratic Alliance — have pressed for stronger constitutional protection, variously framed as inclusion under the Sixth Schedule or a customised arrangement modelled on Article 371. The debate is the clearest current illustration of what happens when a territory loses a legislature without gaining an equivalent alternative.