Earlier this month, a landslide hit a group of miners working a site in Darel Valley. The area is remote enough that the district administration struggled to get communication equipment to the scene at all. Rescue 1122 and the Gilgit-Baltistan Disaster Management Authority were mobilized. The provincial government ordered no delay be tolerated in the relief operation. One miner did not survive. Another was, at the time the news broke, still under the rubble.

I have spent twelve years sourcing gemstones from Pakistan's mountains, and I want to be direct about something uncomfortable: nothing about this was exceptional. It fits, almost exactly, the pattern that Pakistan's own government documents, policy task forces, and independent researchers have described for years. A remote tunnel. No mine plan. No safety inspection regime built for that kind of site. A jurisdiction where the institutions meant to prevent this either do not reach, or were never designed with this purpose in mind.

This is not a story about one landslide. It is a story about a regulatory architecture that was built, piece by piece, over eight decades, to answer questions of ownership, revenue, and provincial autonomy, and that never seriously answered the question of who is responsible for the person standing inside the mountain when it moves. I sat on the Prime Minister's Task Force on Gems and Jewelry that documented parts of this gap in 2021. Five years later, the documentation has not translated into protection.

Pakistan's mining framework rests on a single federal law, the Regulation of Mines and Oilfields and Mineral Development Act of 1948. Under that Act, the federal government administers oil, gas, and nuclear minerals. Everything else, gemstones included, belongs to the provinces. The 18th Amendment in 2010 deepened this further, confirming that mineral development and the safety concerns attached to it sit almost entirely with provincial governments, not Islamabad.

In the four provinces, that means something concrete does exist. Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan each run a Directorate General of Mines and Minerals, and worker safety is enforced, at least on paper, through the Mines Act of 1923 and the provincial Inspectorate of Mines, working alongside the provincial Directorate of Labor. These bodies conduct inspections and investigate accidents. It is not a strong system. But it is a system, with an institutional lineage stretching back a century.

Gilgit-Baltistan does not have that lineage. Along with Azad Jammu and Kashmir, GB is governed on mineral matters through federal channels, specifically the office of the Director General of Petroleum and Natural Resources, rather than through the same Inspectorate of Mines structure the four provinces use. GB has its own Mines and Minerals Department and its own Mining Concession Rules, most recently updated in 2016. What that department does is issue leases, collect royalties, and process licensing applications. It is not, and was never built to be, a labor safety inspectorate with the mandate or the field capacity that the provincial Mines Act apparatus at least nominally has. Layer on top of this a legal and constitutional status that has remained unsettled for more than seventy years, and you have a region where the institutions capable of building a durable worker safety regime have never had the stable ground to build one on.

Even where a provincial system exists in name, it was built around licensed, formal mining operations. That is not how most of Pakistan's gemstone extraction happens. The dominant method across KP, GB, and Balochistan is artisanal, foxhole mining: irregular tunnels dug by hand or by small crews, following a visible vein, with no engineered mine plan and no standard extraction protocol. Blasting is the primary tool for opening these tunnels, because it is cheap and requires no specialized equipment. It is also indiscriminate. Government figures cited in the 2021 Prime Minister's Task Force report put value lost to this kind of extraction at forty to seventy five percent, mostly high quality crystal shattered by the blast itself.

I want to be precise about what that figure means, because it usually gets read only as an economic loss. It is also a structural safety finding. The same indiscriminate blasting that destroys the stone destabilizes the rock face around it. The economic critique of Pakistani mining and the safety critique of Pakistani mining describe the same underlying practice.

And there is, formally, no one watching. Research on Gilgit-Baltistan's mineral sector has concluded plainly that there is no government department responsible for monitoring the welfare of artisanal miners anywhere in Pakistan. When the National Mineral Policy of 2013 addressed informal mining, it introduced provisions to legalize it, meaning an artisanal miner is no longer automatically an outlaw for working outside the formal licensing system. What it did not do is build any apparatus to check whether the tunnel that miner is standing in has been assessed for structural risk, whether the rock face above a mining crew has been surveyed after a season of monsoon rain, or whether anyone with engineering training has looked at the site at all. Pakistan's own government documentation, prepared for its own mineral policy process, concedes as much: none of the country's mineral producing areas have ever had modern equipment, safety standards, or the expertise of a mining engineer, at any point.

That is not a criticism I am making from outside the industry. It is the industry's own diagnosis of itself, repeated across government reports for over a decade, and it applies with particular force in Gilgit-Baltistan, where the provincial safety architecture that exists elsewhere in the country does not exist at all.

One of the more useful things I have read on this in the past year is a case study, published in a recent study of Pakistan's stone and mineral economy, tracing a single family of emerald miners in Mingora across three generations. The grandfather worked for the old state Gemstone Corporation in the 1970s, drawing a steady wage under what the author describes as rudimentary safety provisions. The father worked through the privatization era of the 1990s, in progressively more precarious conditions. The son mines independently today, renting tunnels by the month from a landlord based in Peshawar who has never set foot in the mine.

I use this example because it makes a point that the news cycle around any single accident cannot make on its own. The vulnerability of an artisanal miner in Pakistan is not a temporary phase the country is passing through on its way to something better. It has now persisted across three full generations of the same family, through nationalization, through privatization, through every policy era Pakistan has tried. The mountain changed hands. The son's position relative to that mountain did not improve on his father's, or his grandfather's.

I raise this not to draw a direct line to Darel Valley specifically. I do not have, and would not presume to have, the individual facts of that family's circumstances. I raise it because the structural position of an artisanal gemstone miner working a remote tunnel in Gilgit-Baltistan in 2026 is, in every documented respect, the same structural position an artisanal miner occupied in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the 1990s. Whatever changed about Pakistan's gemstone sector in the intervening thirty years, and a great deal has changed, this did not.

What makes this particularly frustrating, from where I sit, is that Pakistan has already run the pilot and it worked. PASDEC, with a World Bank multidonor trust fund, executed a mechanization project across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's marble and dimensional stone quarries. The model was simple: machinery placed at quarries on subsidized rental, operators pay for use, the fund maintains and repairs the equipment, and provincial mining staff are trained alongside it in modern extraction, quality grading, and safety practice. Years later, the machines are still running in Buner and Malakand. And the project's own safety training component measurably reduced accident rates at participating sites.

That is a genuine proof of concept for exactly the kind of institutional intervention this piece is arguing for. But the project's mechanization scope deliberately excluded gemstone mining. The stated reasoning was that gemstones need different interventions, certification, traceability, market channel development, rather than the equipment mechanization that produced the safety dividend elsewhere. I understand the logic. Gemstone mining and dimensional stone quarrying are genuinely different problems in some respects. But that distinction has had one consequence worth naming plainly: the demonstrated safety benefit of the PASDEC model has never been extended to the part of Pakistan's mineral sector I work in every day.

This is not a new observation on my part. The mining machinery rental pool concept, three pools across GB, AJK, and KP, accessible to registered small miners so they are not left dependent on blasting because it is the only tool they can afford, was a specific recommendation of the Prime Minister's Task Force report I helped prepare in 2021. Five years on, it has not been funded or implemented. Pakistan has not failed to identify the fix. It has failed to build it.

First, Pakistan needs a unified minimum mining safety standard that does not evaporate at a provincial or territorial boundary. A miner's basic protection should not depend on whether the vein he is following happens to run through Punjab's Inspectorate of Mines jurisdiction or through Gilgit-Baltistan's separate, federally administered system that was never built with worker safety as its founding purpose.

Second, extend the PASDEC machinery rental and safety training model specifically into gemstone producing regions, rather than treating gemstones as a special case that only needs certification and traceability layered on top of the status quo. Certification protects a buyer's confidence in the stone. It does nothing at all for the person who cut it out of the rock.

Third, formalize artisanal miners through a registration process tied to genuine protections, not only to tax capture. Basic insurance, hazard training, and a functioning emergency response protocol for remote sites, funded in part through the mineral royalty and development fund structures the sector already contributes to.

Fourth, use the leverage Pakistan already has. In November 2021, a European jewellery retailer returned a shipment of Pakistani rough gemstones because it could not produce mine to market traceability documentation. That is now the norm, not the exception, in international buying. Provenance and ESG requirements from international buyers are only going to tighten. Pakistan's gemstone sector should tie that documentation explicitly to verified safety compliance at the point of extraction, not just to the origin of the stone and its chain of custody afterward. A buyer paying a premium for a traceable, ethically sourced Pakistani emerald should know, specifically, what part of that premium is protecting the person who mined it.

I source stones from miners across KP, Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir, and Baluchistan. The business my family built exists because men and women go into narrow, unmapped tunnels chasing the same veins of emerald, aquamarine, and peridot that eventually reach a cutting bench in Lahore and, from there, a customer somewhere in the world who will likely never think about where the stone came from. I think about it, because I have stood in some of those tunnels myself.

The landslide in Darel Valley added no new fact to the case Pakistan has already built against itself, in its own task force reports, its own policy documents, its own researchers' findings, across more than a decade. What is missing is not diagnosis. Pakistan has diagnosed this problem repeatedly and in detail. What is missing is follow-through, funded, implemented, and extended to the people who are, right now, still underground.