Kashmir grows some of the finest apples, walnuts, and saffron on the planet, and it sends most of that bounty out the door raw. 

That single fact explains why a valley with extraordinary natural gifts still counts on schemes to survive when the weather turns bad or tourists stop coming. 

Last year, both happened at once.

Apple production dropped for a second straight year, down roughly 30 percent because of erratic weather. Tourist arrivals collapsed by more than 52 percent in the first half of 2025, in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack. 

Kashmir economy stands on two legs, agriculture and tourism, and both buckled simultaneously. 

An economy built that way has no floor beneath it, and pretending otherwise is how crises repeat themselves.

Nearly 70 percent of Jammu and Kashmir’s population depends on agriculture. Manufacturing contributes just 18.3 percent of gross state value added, and even the services sector leans heavily on government spending rather than private business. 

Economists have a name for this: a failure to make the structural shift that pulls labour and capital out of low-productivity farming and into higher-value manufacturing. 

Kashmir never made that shift. It stayed put, selling what it........

© Kashmir Observer