Srinagar, Aug. 24 -- Jammu and Kashmir now counts two AIIMS campuses, twelve medical colleges, seventeen critical care blocks and 3,166 Ayushman Arogya Mandirs among its assets, a buildout that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago.

New private hospitals have opened in Srinagar and Jammu, adding cardiac units, oncology wings and kidney transplant programs to a landscape that once relied almost entirely on government institutions.

The buildings are real, so is the money behind them, but what remains missing is any common definition of what a patient can expect once inside, regardless of whether the entrance sign reads government or private.

That absence sounds bureaucratic until it becomes personal.

A district hospital and a five-...