We Are Eating Kashmir’s Future, One Concrete Slab at a Time
Let me tell you what I see when I drive through the outskirts of Srinagar, or through Pulwama, or down the old agricultural belts of Sopore and Baramulla. I see paddy fields that existed five years ago now buried under brick and concrete. I see marriage halls where wheat once grew. I see petrol pumps and coaching centres and half-finished apartment blocks rising from what was, within living memory, some of the most productive soil in the subcontinent. And I see farmers looking at a sky they no longer trust.
This is not a story about the future. This is a story about what is already happening — and about a political class that keeps treating a structural emergency as a seasonal inconvenience.
We have the data. We have always had the data. We just keep choosing not to let it change anything.
In the last decade, Kashmir’s agricultural land has shrunk from 467,700 hectares to approximately 389,000 hectares. Between 1996 and 2023, the Valley lost nearly 34,000 hectares of cultivable farmland. Paddy cultivation — the cultural and nutritional backbone of Kashmiri life — has dropped from 135,000 hectares to 129,000 hectares in just seven years. Fallow land, fields that farmers once tilled but have now simply given up on, has grown from 120,000 to 135,000 hectares in the last four years alone. These are not rounding errors. They are the numbers of a system being dismantled.
The region now produces only 0.45 million tonnes of food grains against a need of 1.34 million tonnes. The gap — 0.89 million tonnes — is filled by rice and grain trucked in from Punjab and Haryana. In 2002, Jammu and Kashmir imported 503,000 metric tonnes of food. By 2016-17, that number had nearly doubled to 952,000 metric tonnes. The trend line has not reversed. It has accelerated. An agricultural economist who spent years inside the Agriculture Department put it in terms that should be printed on the wall of every planning office in Srinagar: “Food self-sufficiency is slipping away from Kashmir at a worrying pace. If 34,000 hectares vanish in less than three decades, imagine what the situation will look like in the next 20 years.” I don’t think most policymakers want to imagine it. That is the problem.
Kashmir’s agriculture is being squeezed from two directions at once, and pretending either crisis exists in isolation is a failure of analysis.
The first is climate change. The Valley’s approximately 18,000 glaciers — the Kolahoi, the Siachen, and thousands of smaller ice bodies in the Pir Panjal and Greater Himalayan ranges — are the region’s natural water towers. They store winter snowfall and release it gradually through June and July, aligned almost exactly with the peak water demands of the agricultural season. That alignment, which generations of Kashmiri farmers built their entire agrarian calendar around, is coming apart. The Kolahoi Glacier has retreated nearly 900 metres over the last 50 years and has lost 23 percent of its total mass. Researcher Shakil Romshoo, who spent three years studying the region’s glaciers, called the rate of melt “alarming.” The Hindu Kush-Himalayan region is warming faster than the global average — what scientists call elevation-dependent warming — and in high-altitude Kashmir, even a small temperature increase produces a disproportionately large impact on ice.
What this means at the field level is not abstract. In 2024, Kashmir recorded its driest year in nearly five decades. Rainfall was 29 percent below the annual average — 870.9 millimetres against a normal of 1,232.3 millimetres — and it was the fifth consecutive year of below-average precipitation. February 2026 was the warmest February on record at monitoring stations across the Valley, with Srinagar hitting an average maximum of 15.6 degrees Celsius and breaking the previous record of 14.9 degrees set in 2016. Winter snowfall, which replenishes the glaciers, is declining. Springs that once ran year-round have dried up, and nearly one in four major springs in farming villages has seen a significant fall in flow. When rain does come now, it arrives in sudden, violent bursts that flood fields rather than nourish them.
The second crisis is one we are entirely responsible for. We are converting the farmland. Not slowly. Not reluctantly. We are building on it, selling it, paving it, and calling it development. Private schools, showrooms, shopping complexes, and residential colonies are spreading from city edges into the rural agricultural belt. Highway development swallows fertile strips. And in 2022, the government removed the 400 square metre cap that had at least nominally restricted the conversion of farmland to commercial use, handing that power to district-level committees in a regulatory environment where enforcement has never been the strong suit. Agriculture Department officials will tell you, as they told reporters last year, that they are “focusing on modern farming techniques, land conservation, and awareness programmes.” That answer is not wrong. It is just catastrophically insufficient for the scale of what is happening.
There is a third dimension to this crisis that the data alone cannot fully capture, and it is the sociological one. Young people in Kashmir’s farming families are leaving agriculture — not because they are being pushed out by explicit policy, but because farming has become economically uncompetitive and socially diminished. A salaried government job offers security that no paddy field can match, especially when that paddy field may be flooded in June and parched in August. When families exit farming, they do not just leave the land unworked. They sell it. They liquidate the asset. And once that land is under concrete, as a farmer from Pulwama said plainly, it is lost forever for farming.
This generational departure is not only an economic loss. It is the erosion of centuries of agrarian knowledge — the irrigation calendars, the soil management practices, the crop variety choices, the understanding of which spring feeds which canal at which time of year. That knowledge does not migrate into a database when a family stops farming. It disappears with the generation that held it. We are not only losing the land. We are losing the people who knew how to read it.
I want to be clear about something. The situation in Kashmir is not a natural disaster. Climate change is partly outside our control at the local level — the warming of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan range is a global problem requiring a global response. But the conversion of farmland to concrete, the failure to enforce existing land-use laws, the 2022 policy decision that loosened restrictions on conversion, the absence of meaningful financial incentives to keep young farmers farming — these are choices. They are choices being made every year by people in positions of authority who know exactly what the data says. The loss of farmland also destroys the ecological buffer that protects what remains. Agricultural land absorbs floodwaters, recharges groundwater, and moderates local temperatures. When it is converted, the Valley becomes more vulnerable to the extreme weather events that climate change is making more frequent. We are removing our defences at the exact moment we need them most.
Successive governments have acknowledged the problem in policy documents. They have committed, on paper, to protecting paddy fields, regulating conversion, strengthening land-use planning, and encouraging high-value agriculture. The gap between those commitments and on-the-ground reality is the clearest measure of how seriously this problem has been taken. It has not been taken seriously enough.
Urban expansion must be redirected upward, not outward. Every apartment block built within an existing urban footprint is an apartment block that does not need to stand on a paddy field. Vertical growth is not an aesthetic preference — it is a food security imperative. Alongside that, farming must be made economically viable for the next generation through price supports, crop insurance that actually functions, market access, and the sustained investment in irrigation infrastructure that the new realities of declining glaciers and erratic rainfall now demand.
The traditional springs and streams that fed Kashmir’s agriculture for centuries must be scientifically mapped, legally protected, and actively restored. They are not heritage features. They are functional infrastructure, and they are disappearing while nobody in authority treats their loss as the emergency it is. And the 2022 decision to loosen land conversion rules must be revisited. The question before policymakers is not whether a district committee can approve a commercial project on farmland. The question is whether farmland should be convertible at all when the Valley is already running a food deficit of 0.89 million tonnes and the climate is taking water away from the fields that remain.
The field, the glacier, the canal, the river, the rice on a Kashmiri table — these are not separate things. They are one chain, and that chain is shortening.
I am not writing this as a counsel of despair. Kashmir’s agriculture has genuine resilience built into it — in its diversity of crops, its centuries of water knowledge, its farmers who return to fields that have let them down two seasons in a row. That resilience is remarkable. But it is not infinite, and it is not a substitute for policy. We have the data. We have the analysis. We have the expert testimony. We have watched the numbers get worse for two decades. What is needed now is not another policy document. What is needed is the political will to treat the disappearance of Kashmir’s farmland as the emergency it is — before the chain breaks, and before the choice of whether to act is no longer ours to make.
The writer is an environmental journalist covering extreme weather events in Jammu and Kashmir. Views are personal
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