Thousands of students leave Jammu and Kashmir for college every year, and thousands more never come back to work. 

Treat that as a footnote and you miss the real story of the union territory’s economy. 

This is a two-stage departure, first of students, then of workers, and it explains more about Kashmir’s stalled growth than any single budget line or investment summit ever could.

Start with the money. 

Remittances usually flow into a region, financing consumption and investment the way Gulf earnings have long supported households in Kerala and construction booms in Punjab. 

Kashmir runs the opposite script. 

Long before any money comes home, households send it out, covering tuition, hostel fees and living costs at institutions in Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Chandigarh and, increasingly, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. 

Seats sit empty at universities inside the valley while students leave for courses those same institutions cannot offer, hobbled by administrative delays, exam backlogs and curricula that haven’t kept up with the fields students want to study. 

With only 142 government degree colleges and roughly 200 private ones serving the whole region, the capacity simply isn’t there. 

Ambition and household savings both head for the exit.

This is a capital outflow with no matching credit. The economic value that a growing student population normally generates – jobs, rent, and small businesses built around campus life – lands in Delhi or Pune........

© Kashmir Observer