Fall of Indian Kashmir’s agricultural land raises flood fears

SRINAGAR: Until a few years ago, Mohammad Sultan Parray and his fellow villagers in Zainakote had no shortage of places to fish.

They could choose from a network of tiny streams threading through swathes of agricultural land in the Hokersar wetland, just 10km north of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.

But almost all the land has now been converted to residential housing.

“It has been happening since the 1980s when we were teenagers, and has entirely changed our surroundings,” he said.

By Parray’s reckoning, since 1989 some 1,300ha of cropland surrounding his village have become residential neighbourhoods.

“If we continue to convert our land like this, we will be left with no agricultural land in a few years,” said the 57-year-old Parray, who refuses to sell any of his 1.2ha.

Srinagar is one of the 100 fastest-growing urban areas in the world, according to a report published in 2011 by the City Mayors Foundation.

But locals and experts say that Kashmiris need to keep their agricultural land to protect Srinagar from flooding, especially as the changing climate has increased the risk of heavy downpours.

They also need the land to reduce their reliance on rice imports and keep rural jobs in the mountainous region where only a third of the land is cultivable.

Land for growing paddy has shrunk by nearly a third since 2012, with a loss of more than 44,000ha, according to the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology (SKUAST).

Farmers are taking advantage of soaring land prices which have risen 70% in the last 20 years, said the university’s director of research, Mohammad Yousuf Zargar.

“Major conversion of paddy land has been due to economic reasons, and if the trend continues, coupled with the climatic change, we will be 80% dependent on imports for meeting our food requirements by the end of this century,” Zargar added.

According to the state government’s latest economic survey, agriculture’s contribution to the state’s GDP has fallen from 28% in 20042005 to 17% in 2014-15.

The state’s director of agriculture, Showkat Ahmad Beigh, said: “We are working on an agricultural policy which can help save our agricultural land.”

Several laws, the most recent of which was passed in 2010, prohibit the conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural uses, but critics say they are not enforced.

“People mostly keep their paddy land idle for two or three years and get it declared Banjar-e-Kaddem (uncultivable land) by revenue officials, before selling it off for residential or commercial use,” said Sajjad Hassan Baba, an agricultural economist at SKUAST. — Reuters