The Cement Shift

A PhD scholar from the valley explains how smarter, cleaner cement production could save Kashmir ₹20-40 crore every year while staying within environmental limits.

- Sheikh Junaid Fayaz

I spend my days building a digital twin of a cement plant, teaching algorithms to think like a kiln operator, and searching for ways to produce cement with less fuel and lower emissions.

It sounds technical and distant from everyday life in Kashmir, but the longer I work on it, the more I realise that this research speaks directly to the price of every house, school, and hospital built back home.

Cement rarely enters our economic debates in the valley. We speak about tourism, apples, handicrafts, education, and technology. We talk about employment and startups. Cement barely features in those conversations, even though it forms the base of every bridge over our rivers and each flood-protection wall that shields our towns.

Development in Kashmir rests on bags of cement stacked in hardware shops and trucked to construction sites in every district.

The numbers reveal how central it is. According to the Cement Manufacturers’ Association, the valley consumes around 2.5 to 3 million tonnes of cement each year. Housing construction accounts for a large portion of this demand, followed by public infrastructure and urban expansion.

New colonies rise at the edges of cities, roads widen, government projects multiply, and each one depends on steady cement supply.

Local production, however, meets only a part of this demand.

Five to six major plants operate in the valley, including Saifeo Cements in Khunmoh, Khyber Cement, Trumboo Cement Industries, Valley Cement Industries, and J and K Cements, along with smaller units concentrated in the Khrew Pulwama and Khunmoh belts.

Together, they produce roughly 0.8 to 1 million tonnes annually. More than half of our requirement, around 1.5 to 2 million tonnes, arrives from other states.