Homes That Feed None

Fields that once fed the valley are vanishing under giant private houses. Unless Kashmir chooses land over concrete, the next generation will inherit empty homes and empty stomachs.

- Irshad Mushtaq

There is a saying every Kashmiri child once heard at the dinner table: “Zaminas tass, makaan paas.” Land is wealth, a house is only a structure.

Beyond proverb, that cultural comment was a way of life.

Families measured prosperity not by how tall their walls were, but by how fertile their soil remained.

A home was a necessity. Land was survival.

Today, that wisdom lies under piles of bricks and cement. Drive even thirty kilometers out of Srinagar and the change is startling.

Villages that once shimmered with paddy fields and saffron blooms now bristle with massive three-storey homes. Orchards that smelled of apples in autumn stand flattened, waiting for truckloads of gravel and iron.

The numbers confirm what the eye already knows.