This news articles is two part series. Part-I is published today.
DODA: Which earthquake-hazard zone Doda sits in. The answer doesn’t depend on the risk factor but on who is asked and when.
Most general accounts place the Himalayan district in Seismic Zone IV, the second-highest tier in India's standard four-category system. But Jammu and Kashmir's own Disaster Management Authority has, on the record, placed it a full grade higher - in Zone V, the same severe category as the Kashmir Valley.
For several months between late 2025 to early 2026, neither category applied. Doda, along with every other district in the Union Territory, was officially placed in a brand-new, still more severe category called Zone VI, before that classification was withdrawn and the older map was restored.
Three answers to one question in less than two years. For a district where seismic risk should be shaping every decision on where and how to build, this does not only raise technical questions; it has direct consequences.
Two zones, one district
According to Disaster Management Authority data reported as recently as last year that Doda, together with the neighbouring districts of Ramban and Kishtwar, - all carved out of the larger undivided Doda district in the mid-2000s - falls within Zone V, the most severe category under India's older classification. Rest of the Union Territory, on that account, sits in the less severe Zone IV.
The discrepancy between this and the more commonly cited "Zone IV" label may reflect nothing more sinister than how loosely the word "Doda" gets used - the present-day district, the larger historical district it was carved from, or the wider Chenab Valley region. If a district's own disaster-management data and the general public record cannot agree on a one-letter classification, more detailed hazard information - which slopes are unstable, which villages are most exposed, which roads would fail first - is unlikely to be any more consistent or accessible.
The distinction makes a difference at the ground level. Zone IV and Zone V carry different mandatory design standards for earthquake-resistant construction, different expectations for retrofitting older buildings, and different weight in land-use and infrastructure planning. A hospital, school or bridge designed to Zone IV specifications in a place that actually behaves like Zone V is under-built for the ground it stands on.
The zone that came and went
The classification question became far more consequential in November 2025, when the Bureau of Indian Standards issued a sweeping revision to the national earthquake design code, IS 1893:2025. Built on modern probabilistic hazard modelling rather than the older approach based largely on historical epicentres, its central change was a new top category, Zone VI, which included the entire Himalayan arc - Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh through Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Sikkim to Arunachal Pradesh - into a single, most-severe hazard class, erasing the old split between Zone IV and Zone V across the mountains.
By early 2026, the Jammu and Kashmir government was confirming in the Union Territory's legislature that the newly notified code placed every district, Doda included, in Zone VI, for a period of months, officially the single most seismically dangerous classification available anywhere in the country.
That did not last long. Within weeks, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs raised concerns about steep construction-cost increases in the newly upgraded zones and about insufficient consultation before the code was finalised, and the Bureau of Indian Standards withdrew the 2025 code, restoring the older IS 1893:2016 standard. As of this report, that restored standard of the four-zone system under which Doda is generally, if inconsistently, described as Zone IV is the one officially in force.
At least one other Himalayan state has its own system in place. Uttarakhand has pressed ahead with its own building bylaws incorporating Zone VI-level requirements for its Himalayan districts regardless of the national code's official status. This bears evidence that the scientific case for a higher classification has outlived the code that briefly tried to formalise it nationwide, even where the paperwork has reverted.
An undisputed hazard
Whatever the argument over labels, the underlying seismicity is not in question. On June 13, 2023, the National Centre for Seismology recorded a magnitude-5.4 earthquake in Doda at a shallow depth of approximately six kilometres. This was among the more significant tremors to have struck the district in recent years. Shallow earthquakes of this kind can generate strong local ground motion, with the resulting shaking and damage shaped by depth, distance from the epicentre, local geology, site amplification and the vulnerability of the buildings and infrastructure involved.
That underlying risk is why the National Disaster Management Authority classifies all of Jammu and Kashmir as a multi-hazard region in the first place, and why its earthquake guidelines call for earthquake-resistant construction, enforcement of building codes, retrofitting of vulnerable structures, land-use planning and district-level preparedness, irrespective of which zone number is attached to a given map.
None of this changes the geology. Whether the applicable label today is Zone IV, Zone V, or the shelved Zone VI, Doda sits on some of the most tectonically active ground in India. What has changed, repeatedly and in a short space of time, is only the official paperwork describing that fact.
The instability in the record itself is the backdrop against which everything else happening on Doda's slopes now has to be judged, from road-cutting to riverbed extraction to the district's expanding mining and quarrying activity.
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