A family in Zanskar can be several hours and a mountain pass away from the nearest council office that is supposed to represent them. That distance is the honest case for seven hill councils instead of two. It is also, civil society leaders argue, exactly why the timing of this expansion should worry anyone watching the still-unresolved Article 371 negotiations.

When More Institutions Means Less Power, Not More

The text says decentralisation; in practice, elected Ladakhi leaders say something closer to the opposite. Chief Secretary Ashish Kundra has framed the expansion of hill councils from two to seven as "a major step towards democratic decentralisation," and the geographic case is genuine - villages in districts like Zanskar are separated from any administrative centre by mountain passes and hours of travel and each new district logically invites its own council under Section 3 of the LAHDC Act.

Taken purely on its own terms, seven councils for seven districts sounds like government moving closer to people it has always struggled to reach.

Where "In Practice" Breaks the Argument But the

gap between the rule as written and the rule as practiced is exactly where this story lives. Tsering Namgyal, the Leader of Opposition in LAHDC-Leh, has said decision-making has shifted to the Lieutenant Governor's secretariat and departmental secretaries, with the existing councils' recommendations on land routinely ignored and their staff increasingly redeployed to the UT administration instead.

ABL co-chairman Chherring Dorje Lakruk goes further, calling the existing councils "virtually defunct." If that description is accurate, then multiplying two functionally hollowed-out institutions into seven does not multiply grassroots power - it multiplies the number of institutions that can be pointed to as evidence of decentralisation while actual authority continues to sit with the Lieutenant Governor's office.

The second complication is timing. Negotiations over a Union Territory-level representative body under a customised Article 371 framework are still underway and civil society leaders argue that seven councils now on the table would leave that future body with little to actually govern.

Their objection is not to decentralisation itself, but to a specific sequencing question: should district-level bodies be multiplied before or after the shape of the overarching representative government is settled? Reports that the seven-council proposal appeared in draft minutes of a May 22 Centre-Ladakh meeting, was refused sign-off by Ladakh representatives and then reappeared in the administration's announcement without further consultation, sharpen that concern into a specific procedural grievance rather than a general one.

For the exam, the useful distinction is between statutory decentralisation and constitutional decentralisation. Ladakh's hill councils, unlike Sixth Schedule Autonomous District Councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura, carry no constitutional status, no independent legislative power and no judicial authority over customary matters - their powers exist entirely at the pleasure of ordinary statute and administrative practice.

That is precisely why civil society groups are fighting so hard over Article 371: a constitutionally anchored body cannot be hollowed out by the same administrative drift that, by multiple elected leaders' own accounts, has already hollowed out the councils Ladakh currently has.