Dispossession by Design: How Post-2019 Infrastructure Projects Are Starving Kashmir’s Fields and Future
Muhammad Waleed Akhtar
In Wathoora, a village in Budgam district of Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, farmers watched bulldozers tear through paddy fields that had fed their families for generations. The Srinagar Semi-Ring Road required their land. Approximately 488 kanals of prime agricultural soil were acquired, compensation disputes filed, and High Court directions issued ordering enhanced payments. As of February 2026, the National Highways Authority of India had still not paid. The fields are gone. The money has not arrived. The family still needs to eat.
This is not an isolated grievance from one village in one district. It is a pattern playing out across IIOJK, where a post-2019 infrastructure surge is systematically consuming the agricultural land upon which Kashmir’s food security, rural economy and indigenous way of life depend. The roads, railways and satellite townships being built across the territory are presented by New Delhi as development. Examined against the evidence, they function as dispossession by another name.
The scale of agricultural land loss in IIOJK is documented, quantified and alarming. Since 2000, the territory has lost more than 60,000 hectares of agricultural land. Between 2015 and 2023, cultivable area declined from 741,000 hectares to 681,000 hectares, an eight percent reduction in under a decade. The Kashmir Valley alone lost approximately 34,000 hectares of cultivable farmland between 1996 and 2023. In Srinagar district, nearly 40 percent of farmland has disappeared over two decades. In Kulgam and Pulwama, between 30 and 50 percent of paddy area has been lost.
The consequences for food security are not theoretical. Kashmir’s rice production currently stands at 0.45 million tonnes annually, meeting only 35 percent of domestic demand. Seventy percent of households now rely on the Public Distribution System for imported food grains. According to the NITI Aayog’s 2022 State Nutrition Profile, rural dietary energy intake in Jammu and Kashmir stands at 1,897 kilocalories per person per day, below the national rural average of 2,099 kilocalories and reflecting a 38 percent calorie deficit. A territory that once fed itself from its own soil is now structurally dependent on food imported from outside.
The post-2019 infrastructure surge has dramatically accelerated this process. The Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link has acquired 1,559 hectares of private land, with 816 crore rupees in compensation deposited as of August 2025 according to official parliamentary data. Nine major satellite townships have been identified for development, with 1,298 kanals already notified across districts including Pulwama, Bandipora, Ganderbal and Srinagar. More than 8,600 acres have been earmarked for industrial estates, with over 200 non-local investors, primarily from Delhi, Haryana and Punjab, allotted land since 2019.
The proposed NH-701A highway connecting Rajouri to Baramulla via the Mughal Road cuts directly through Kashmir’s apple heartland in Shopian, Yousmarg, Doodhpathri and Charar-e-Sharief. The Shopian district alone produces between three and 3.5 lakh metric tonnes of apples annually. Farmers in the region have described their orchards as their lifeline. Survey drones and gypsum markings have appeared in orchards without formal notice or consultation. Land acquisition proceedings are underway. The project has been green-lit.
What is being taken is not merely land measured in kanals and hectares. It is the productive foundation of a rural economy. Once agricultural land is converted to concrete, roads, or residential colonies, it is permanently and irreversibly lost to cultivation. No compensation figure restores a paddy field, and no payment rebuilds canal systems shaped over generations.
The post-2019 revocation of Articles 370 and 35A, followed by the land law amendments of October 2020, did not simply alter political status. They dismantled legal protections that had long restricted the transfer of land to non-residents. Foundational safeguards such as the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act of 1950 and the Jammu and Kashmir Alienation of Land Act of 1938 were repealed or rendered ineffective. In their place, the Central Land Acquisition Act of 2013 now operates without earlier indigenous safeguards.
This has created a framework that enables rapid acquisition of agricultural land for projects often benefiting external actors. Official data shows 631 non-residents have purchased 386 kanals since 2019. Industrial estates now occupy formerly fertile land, while historic irrigation systems like the Nandi Canal face decline due to neglect and unregulated development priorities.
Under international human rights standards, the right to food and indigenous control over land carry clear legal weight. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has affirmed that large-scale land acquisition without free, prior, and informed consent violates these rights, regardless of compensation. In IIOJK, farmers report receiving acquisition notices instead of consultation, inadequate compensation, and long delays in court-ordered payments.
This reflects governance imposed on a population, not with it. While infrastructure is framed as development, for farmers facing land loss, waterlogging, and rising food dependence, it represents dispossession rather than progress.
A territory that cannot feed itself from its own soil has lost something that no road, railway or satellite township can restore. What is being built across IIOJK is infrastructure. What is being dismantled, field by field and orchard by orchard, is the foundation upon which any genuinely self-sustaining Kashmiri future would have to rest.That is not development. It is the architecture of permanent dependency.
The author is a student of International Relations at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Currently, he is serving as an intern at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations Islamabad.
