Jammu and Kashmir’s Planning Department has unveiled a Data Management Strategy seeking to harmonise fragmented government records. The document identifies five “strategic pillars” meant to anchor this shift: data governance and standards; base registries and unique identifiers; interoperability and harmonisation; data security, privacy and audit; and institutional capacity and coordination. The Flip SideYet the ambition of the strategy runs up against a problem no dashboard can retroactively fix: the historical discontinuity in Jammu and Kashmir’s own data record. Scaling that coordination across dozens of departments, officials acknowledge, will be a considerably harder test. The bigger challenges are reconciling Jammu and Kashmir’s fragmented statistical records since 2019 and ensuring consistent coordination across departments.