Gilgit-Baltistan

Gilgit-Baltistan

Subject: Mapping

Context: Pakistani authorities have finalised a law to award provisional provincial status to strategically located Gilgit-Baltistan, a media report said on Sunday.

Concept:

• Gilgit-Baltistan has functioned as a “provincial autonomous region” since 2009.
• Besides, India has conveyed that the entire Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, including the areas of Gilgit and Baltistan, are an integral part of India by virtue of its fully legal and irrevocable accession.

Location of the region

• It shares a geographical boundary with Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and India considers it as part of the undivided Jammu and Kashmir, while Pakistan sees it as a separate from PoK.
• Located in the northern Pakistan. It borders China in the North, Afghanistan in the west, and Tajikistan in the North West and Kashmir in the south east.
• Gilgit-Baltistan is the northernmost territory administered by Pakistan, providing the country’s only territorial frontier, and thus a land route, with China, where it meets the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
• To G-B’s west is Afghanistan, to its south is Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and to the east J&K
• It has a regional Assembly and an elected Chief Minister.
• China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) also passes through this region.
• Gilgit-Baltistan is home to five of the “eight-thousanders” and to more than fifty peaks above 7,000 metres (23,000 ft).
• Three of the world’s longest glaciers outside the polar regions are found in Gilgit-Baltistan.