'Our Lands Produce...': Why Kashmiris Are Opposing Centre's Mega Infra Push

Locals allege that infrastructure projects will divest them of their orchard lands and threaten their livelihoods.

A farmer staring into the vast rice field that is likely to be turned into a satellite township near the Srinagar Ring Road project.

(Photo Courtesy: Mehran Bhat)

Muhammad Shafi owns 3 kanals (1,518 square metres) of horticulture land set amidst the dense apple orchards of Dirhama village in South Kashmir’s Anantnag district. The patch of land produces apples worth Rs 9 lakh every season – a key source of income for his family of nine.

Dirhama is a quiet village of just 150 homes surrounded by a vast mosaic of individual orchard plots stretching into the horizon. The village is wedged right between a promontory jutting out from the mountains on one side and the famous River Lidder that drifts placidly on the other. 

But from the last one year, the villagers have been driven to edge following the decision by the Indian Railways to conduct surveys and earmark an estimated 650 kanals (3 lakh square meters) of village land for a proposed railway station in the area that will be constructed as part of the rail expansion in J&K. 

The villagers allege that such a move will divest them of their prime orchard lands and threaten their livelihoods. The issue has now snowballed into a major political controversy in J&K, where Chief Minister Omar Abdullah is already at loggerheads with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Centre over the restoration of statehood.

The move has raised concerns about how the big infrastructure projects in J&K are stripping the Union Territory of much of its agricultural land, taking away the means of sustenance for a large number of people at a time when unemployment in the region has touched a record 32 percent. 

It was in December last year when Shafi noticed the presence of wires woven around part of his orchards in an effort to demarcate the land.

“I didn’t really know what was going on initially. But only after the demarcations were extended into the neighbouring village of Gadiseer that residents raised a hue and cry. Out of 150 homes in Dirhama, around 80 households are likely to lose their main source of income after the proposed project materialises.”

Muhammad Shafi

Most Ambitious Rail Project in the Country

The Union Ministry of Railways describes the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link (USBRL) Project, which is going to connect the Kashmir Valley with the rest of the country by an all-weather train service, as “the most difficult new railway line project undertaken in the country post-Independence.”

Originally conceived in 1995, the project is an engineering marvel as it involves drilling a series of tunnels through the sturdy Himalayan Mountain range that remains prone to natural disasters due to which road access to the Kashmir valley remains cut off in the event of bad weather. 

One of these tunnels is around 13 km long, making it the longest transportation railway tunnel in India. Also, a part of the project is the 1,315-metre Chenab Arch Bridge, the world’s highest railway bridge that sits astride the two sides of Chenab River in Reasi district.

The Arch Bridge has become an emblem of the Narendra Modi government's new development pitch in the region. 

Last year, the ministry revealed that it had commissioned the Final Location Survey (FLS) for the five additional lines to the existing railway network in J&K. As per the proposal, four new lines for the Baramulla-Uri (50 km), Sopore-Kupwara (33.7 km),  Awantipora-Shopian (27.6 km), and Anantnag-Bijbehara-Pahalgam (77.5 km) stretches would be added while the Baramulla-Banihal section (135.5 km) would be doubled.

Of these, two (Anantnag-Bijbehara-Pahalgam and Awantipora-Shopian lines) have led to the eruption of protests in many parts of South Kashmir because they cut their way right through the lush apple orchards owned privately by the local villagers, affecting an estimated 280 hectares of agricultural land. 

The widespread outrage has now revived the debate on whether the mega infrastructure projects such as railway lines, highways, and residential townships, which are being constructed at the expense of fertile agricultural land in J&K, are even required to begin with.

Aga Ruhullah, MP for the Srinagar constituency, raised this issue in the Parliament, calling the new railway expansion a “colonial project” that is being implemented without “any demand from the locals".

However, BJP's J&K spokesperson Altaf Thakur termed such opposition as bogus, adding that villagers whose land will be used for the projects will be compensated. “These parties are averse to development. They want J&K to go back to the stone age. Today, the travel time between Jammu and Srinagar is reduced to a few hours. That was only possible because the government was able to carry out such developmental projects,” he told The Quint.

The Road-Building Spree in J&K After 2019 

According to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 54 mega infrastructure projects worth over Rs 150 crore each are in progress in J&K at the moment. Forty-eight of these projects pegged collectively at Rs 64,000 crore have been commissioned in or after 2019. 

As per The Quint's tally of these projects, a bulk of them, 41, are linked to road transport and highways, signalling increasing stress on the road connectivity in the erstwhile state where a border conflict with China, and militant infiltration from Pakistan, remains a prime defence concern. 

The projects include the four-laning of the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway at an estimated cost of Rs 16,000 crore and involves a panoply of tunnels (at least 10), bridges, and viaducts. 

After the highway is completed, it will reduce the travel time between Srinagar and Jammu to just six hours. 

Two special tunnels at Khooninallah and Makarkoot areas in Jammu were commissioned as part of the same project upon the advice of the experts to sidestep the disaster-prone stretches where the work had to be stopped due to recurring landslides and damage to the machinery. 

Another four-lane Srinagar Ring Road project will see the construction of a 68-km-long network of wide roadways aimed at decongesting the traffic chaos in Srinagar city and facilitate better connectivity between the four districts (Pulwama, Srinagar, Budgam and Baramulla) in the Kashmir Valley. The first phase of the project, which will link Galandar area of Pulwama in South Kashmir with Narbal area of Srinagar in Central Kashmir, is nearing completion. The project comes at the cost of Rs 2,919 crore.

Billed at Rs 823.45 crore, the four-laning of a 161-km-long Srinagar-Baramulla-Uri highway, yet another big road project, will unfold in two phases. The first phase will involve Narbal-Baramulla section followed by the Baramulla-Uri stretch near the Line of Control (LoC). The projects include two bypass roads at Pattan and Baramulla and flyovers at Sangrama and Delina areas in North Kashmir.

With an estimated cost of around Rs 1,405 crore, another road-widening project of a 51-km stretch of NH 701, traversing the areas of Rafiabad, Kupwara, Chowkibal, Tangdhar, and Chamkot, will ease the transportation between the districts of Baramulla and Kupwara that have strategic importance because of their proximity to the LoC. 

A part of the larger Zojila tunnel programme that seeks to fast-track the connectivity to Ladakh to mobilise the military to the border regions at short notice, the National Highways & Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL) is building the 6.4-km-long Z-Morh tunnel that will provide year-round access to the tourist resort of Sonmarg in Central Kashmir district of Ganderbal which is located on the way to Ladakh. 

The Enormity of Projects Has Caused Disquiet

These extensive and heavy-duty infrastructure projects had already caused anger to simmer over the mechanisms used for acquiring the land, not least because the land being purchased or leased is agricultural land.

Earlier in October, 40-year-old Irshad Hussain (name changed) from Khanda village in Budgam was perturbed when a pathwari, a local official responsible for maintaining revenue records, surveyed his 8 kanals (4,047 square meters) of paddy field just opposite the construction site where the Srinagar Ring Road project is coming up. As per the notification of J&K House Board Department – a copy of which has been accessed by The Quint – the board is developing integrated a satellite township within 500 meters of both sides of the Ring Road. 

The move has already ignited a political storm with the leaders from the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) questioning if the housing plots were being commissioned to resettle non-locals. 

Khanda village in Budgam district in Central Kashmir where the J&K Housing Board will develop 30 satellite townships, affecting 200 hectares of agricultural land.

(Photo Courtesy: Mehran Bhat)

The anxieties over “demographic changes” has been an emotive subject in Kashmir, especially after the Union Territory’s domicile laws were tweaked in 2020, allowing Indian citizens under certain specified conditions to obtain residency permits in J&K that will allow them to purchase land and apply for government jobs. 

Although Hussain has been promised to receive proceeds earned from the sale of housing plots, he is not willing to part ways with his land on which he grows mostly rice.

“It was in 2022 when we first received the notification regarding the project, but I didn’t realise back then it was about township. We were prohibited from undertaking any construction work in our fields,” Hussain said referring to the notification, which The Quint has seen, in which Kashmir’s divisional commissioner invokes the J&K Town Planning Act 1963 to impose a moratorium on any construction work, and the sale and purchase of land within 500 meters of the Ring Road. 

“I don’t want any money. We have been cultivators for generations. Why would I give my land to someone else to construct a hose?” Hussain asked. “Where will we go after they take our land?”

Land-owners Aren't Satisfied With Compensation Plans

Hussain is already entangled in a legal tussle over a similar issue of acquisition of land for the Ring Road project for the last six years. He was among the 500 families in Budgam who were affected by the NHAI’s decision to acquire 590 acres of land for the road project. 

For the 2 kanals of land he had to forfeit for the Ring Road project, the government compensated him under the Land Acquisition Act 1990 which became defunct the following year with the abrogation of Article 370. 

However, under the newly applicable Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, the villagers were entitled to higher compensation – four times the market rate. The villagers' demand to be compensated under the new law is sub judice in the Supreme Court. 

The Alarming Decline of Land Holding in J&K

Environmentalists and civil society activists have decried attempt to take away the agricultural land from the villagers as "arbitrary".  

“The new Right to Fair Compensation Act of 2013 is a progressive legislation with provisions for social impact assessment, environment management plans, consent from village assemblies and more,” said Raja Muzaffar Bhat, an RTI activist from Budgam. 

“But are these provisions being followed on the ground? It doesn’t look like it. For more than a year, the Union Territory is devoid of elected village heads as there have been no panchayat elections. So, who is supposed to give consent?”

Muzaffar Bhat

Bhat said that given the drastic shrinking of agricultural land holdings in J&K, it wasn’t desirable for the government to get the cultivators to concede whatever little land is left with them. “In 2011, the average agricultural land holdings in J&K stood at 0.61 hectares. In 2016, this had come down to 0.59 hectares. Today, it would be even less,” he said.

The economic experts view such a decline of average land holdings in J&K as highly alarming. “A quarter (40 lakh) of Kashmir’s total population is dependent on agriculture for a living,” a Srinagar-based economist working with a leading bank in Kashmir said, pleading anonymity.

Together, the agriculture and allied sectors including horticulture account for 17 percent of J&K’s GDP.

“Already in the last 20 years, J&K is turning into a consumption-driven economy. Our import bills are rising.”

Srinagar-based economist

Apples produced in J&K account for 80 percent of India’s total apple exports which is pegged at 25 lakh metric tonnes. They generated an annual revenue between Rs 8,000 crore and 10,000 crore. “That’s a sizable income for a region whose GDP is 1.8 lakh crore,” said the economist. “But when these sectors get hit, the rural household economy will be adversely affected.”

In Dirhama, Shafi’s worries grow with each passing day as there’s no guarantee that the government is going to relent on its decision to construct new railway lines.

“Even if they pay us in crores, it will last only so long before we run out of the money,” Shafi said. “But orchards provide us with a financial security that the compensation cannot. My son is approaching 40 and he has a postgraduate degree in Zoology, and he is still unemployed. It is this orchard that is providing him his income. If we lose it, we will have no option but to die.” 

(Shakir Mir is an independent journalist. He has also written for The Wire, Article 14, Caravan Magazine, Firstpost, The Times of India and more. He tweets at @shakirmir. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)