Kashmir's cricket bat industry facing final innings

For more than 100 years they have been making cricket bats from Kashmir's willow trees

- Kamran Yousufs

Along the highway leading to the town of Sangam in the Indian-administered region, dozens of little workshops display neat stacks of the roughly hewn pale wood outside.

Inside, the willow is painstakingly fashioned into cricket bats, which are then shipped across India and to other countries around the world.

The humid environment and fertile soil make the area ideal for willows, which traditionally provide the material for cricket bats. Kashmiri willow bats have a reputation for quality, and skilled bat-makers here have refined their craft since the 19th century.

But the plantations created decades ago are not being replaced by farmers, who are turning to more lucrative crops with greater resilience in a changing climate. Many have replaced willows with poplars, a faster-growing and more profitable source of timber, which is used to make plywood.

Now the blocks of willow, known as clefts, are becoming harder to obtain, putting the industry here and the 100,000 people employed in it at risk.