Pencil in this shortage

India's 'pencil village' faces uncertain future due to raw material crises

- TAUSEEF AHMAD AND SAJID RAINA 

OUKHOO IS not a place that you may have heard of, but the last pencil you used is almost certain to have come from here. The non-descript village in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir supplies slats—rectangular wood pieces— for most of India’s pencils. However, there is an acute decline in the numbers of the poplar (Populus deltoids) tree that is used in making the slats, say manufacturing units.

Down To Earth visited all the 17 units operating in the village to find that from the earlier average of 100-150 workers employed per unit, the number has come down to 40-50. There is no official record of the slats supplied or people employed to assess the decline in production of slats. But unit-owners and workers say that employment opportunities are disappearing. “These factories not only produce pencils but also provide us employment. We are around 30 girls working in the factory, and most of us belong to poor families,” says Fatima Nabi, a local girl working in a factory.

Poplar’s shortage started in 2015, when the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir ordered felling of poplar trees to curb pollen-related chest infections. The intermittent political unrest in the state slowed down the process in 2016 (see ‘Tilting at poplar trees’,