Looms are falling silent in Kashmir's handicraft villages

With trade hit by uncertainty and Covid-19, youths are looking elsewhere for employment

On a cold November morning in north Kashmir’s Kanihama village, 20-year-old Adil Shafi Bhat loads his three-wheeler with LPG cylinders. Then slipping on a woollen pheran (tradi­tional Kashmiri cloak), he heads for Srinagar, 20 km away, to get the empty cylinders replaced.

As he drives through the lanes of Kanihama, which the central government in association with the state government is planning to develop as a “Craft Tourism Village” for its contribution towards Kani shawl art, he passes by groups of artisans on their way to the looms. Not long ago, he too would have been one among them.

A promising artisan, Bhat recently gave up on Kani shawl weaving, a craft he was adept at, to become a full-time three-wheeler driver. It wasn’t a choice he enjoyed making. But he says there was no alternative.

“The main reason for leaving this profession was low returns,” he says. “As a weaver, I would spend over 12 hours a day and earn barely Rs 300 for it. Now I make Rs 1,000-1,500 driving a three-wheeler and working half of those hours.”

The picturesque village of Ka­n­ihama, which sits by the Srinagar-Gulmarg highway, has 400 households. With 90 per cent of its population engaged in handicraft, the village produ­ces 500 to 700 shawls a year. Kani shawls are woven from Pashmina yarn on a loom using tiny needles. Each shawl costs between Rs 60,000 and Rs 3 lakh-plus, depending on the material and the intricacy of the pattern.

Like Bhat, in recent years se­v­eral youth of Kani­hama and ad­jacent villages have moved away from handicraft, an industry that has borne the brunt of uncertainty in the state. The Co­vid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns it brought with it have only accelerated this exodus.

A stone’s throw away from Bhat’s home lives Shabir Ah­m­ad Reshi, 29, who is still engaged in Kani shawl weaving — a vocation he wants to urgen­t­ly get out of. “This was my father’s profe­ssion, too. In those days, the ret­urns were good. So, I also decided to make a living out of it. Now all I have are regrets,” he says.

Data from the Department of Handicrafts and Handloom su­ggests in the last five years, ex­­ports have slipped by over 45 per cent. With handicraft sto­ck not reaching potential markets like Europe and West Asia, both their rates and pr­o­duction have fallen.

The handicraft ind­u­stry is one of the big­g­est employment generators for Kashmir, and earns over Rs 1,700 crore as foreign excha­nge annually. From Pas­h­mina shawls to handwoven carpets and papier-mâché products, the sector employs some 400,000 people in the Valley.

Slip in exports

Firdous Ahmad Bhat, the 65-year-old owner of Habib Asian carpets in Srinagar, says it is for the first time in his career spanning over 40 years that his carpets haven’t sold. With the international market still to recover from Covid-19, he has unsold carpets worth over Rs 40 lakh gathering dust at home.

In June, the Kashmir Cham­ber of Commerce and Industries estimated handicrafts worth Rs 600 crore were lying unsold in the Valley. In 2016-17, handicrafts including carpet, shawl, papier-mâché, crewel and wood carving worth Rs 1,151.12 crore were exported from Jammu and Kashmir. In 2017-18, these exp­orts fell to Rs 1,090.12 crore and in 2018-19, to Rs 917.93 crore.

In 2019-2020, when the Cen­tre made Article 370 inoperative and communication lines were snapped for over six months, ex­ports stood at Rs 935.25 crore with the first two quarters making for 40 per cent of these. Then came the Covid blow in 2020-21, and the sector recorded exports worth a mere Rs 635.52 crore.

Firdous Ahmad Bhat is desperately ho­p­ing exports resume so that he can repay the loans he took to buy raw material. “Thankfully, carpets have a good shelf life. I can’t afford to sell them at cheaper prices or I will end up with losses,” he says.

Incentives and bailouts

Some 20 km from Srinagar, in Ban­dipore district, lies Gad­k­h­ud, which has emerged as Kash­mir’s carpet village. Of the 400 or so households here, nearly 95 per cent have looms at home. For the last few years, however, its youth have been moving to the summer capital, Srinagar, in search of labour or to work in the nearby orchards.

“A carpet weaver earns barely Rs 100 per day, while doing labour work fetches him Rs 500-700, including meals,” says Bashir Ahmad, a carpet dealer from Gadkhud.

Carpets are among the cost­liest of Kashmir’s handicrafts, with a square-foot costing bet­ween Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 in the international market. It takes a minimum of three months to create a handcrafted carpet, which is then sold for Rs 2 lakh to Rs 20 lakh, depending on its size and the kind of knotting.

In many homes of Gadkhud, the looms have gone silent as people turn to embroidery, which earns them more.

The hit to the handicraft sector has impacted the state’s em­ployment rate. Against a rate of 7.1 per cent recorded across In­d­ia, J&K, acc­ording to the Cen­tre for Moni­toring Indian Econ­omy, had an unemployment rate of 22.2 per cent for October — the highest among all states and union territories.

The Kashmir Pashmina Org­a­n­isation (KPO), an amalgam of artisans, weavers, manufacture­rs, exporters and retailers, has been receiving distress calls. “We are on the verge of collapsi­ng if the government doesn’t in­t­er­v­ene,” says Musadiq Shah, se­nior vice-president, KPO. “Our dem­and is that the government buy our unsold woven shawls and carpets through its emporiums.”

Adds Mahmood Ahmad Shah, director, Handicrafts and Handloom Kashmir: “Due to Co­vid-19, we missed the Domo­tex carpet fair, which is held in Germany and is vital for our handicrafts department.”

To help with the situation, the state government has plan­ned back-to-back exhibitions countrywide. “We recently held one at Pragati Maidan in Delhi and another at Noida Haat. More are planned,” Shah says, adding, “The administration has announced a major incent­ive. Ten per cent of the total volume of handicraft/handloom products exported, with maxi­m­um reimbursement of Rs 5 cro­re (whichever is less), will be provided to eligible exporters registered with the handicrafts and handloom department.”