Trapped in Their Own Land

As barbed wires rise around apple orchards, Kashmir's paddy cultivators find themselves locked out of fields they legally own. This isn't just a land crisis, it's the collapse of a culture rooted in water, trust, and soil.

- Mohammad Amin Mir

In Kashmir, rice grew on more than rain. It followed unmarked paths, shared water, and the unspoken trust of neighbours—where memory guided what maps never showed.

For centuries, kouls—the thin arteries of glacial water—ran freely between fields, over rocks, under trees, threading through a land that never needed to be told where to go. Rice farmers walked across neighbours’ lands like guests, not trespassers. No fence stood in their way. No gate was locked. The land was broken into plots, but the people, somehow, weren't.

That was before the barbed wire.

In the past twenty years, the rise of apple orchards in Kashmir has come not just with profit and promise, but with enclosure. Fields once open to the sky are now cut with metal spines, rolled tight and sharp, fencing in apples and fencing out everything else.

Paddy farmers, once free to tend their land as the seasons demanded, now must ask, beg, or sneak through the very soil they own. Their fields still lie there, but unreachable. Possession, it turns out, is not the same as access.

What used to be shared is now sealed. A farmer who once strolled to his land with a sickle now climbs over wire with a stick. Locked gates, missing maps, angry neighbours, and blocked water have become his daily harvest.