Dehradun, July 5 -- Not every city gets to watch itself being born. Dehradun did. When Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh on 9 November 2000, most of us who called it home felt a strange mixture of pride and apprehension. Pride, because this was our moment. Apprehension, because we had seen what development could do to a place and we were not entirely sure we were ready for it.

Before statehood, the hills were administered from Lucknow, a distant capital that could not fully understand the aspirations, the terrain, or the tempo of a mountain people. The High Court was in Lucknow. The Secretariat was in Lucknow. Every file, every petition, every development proposal had to travel hundreds of kilometres down to it before it could ...