A weaver in Srinagar’s old city can still turn raw pashm into a shawl fine enough to pull through a ring, a skill passed down since the workshops Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin encouraged nearly six centuries ago. 

That shawl may sell in Delhi or Paris for a sum the weaver never sees written on a receipt of his own. 

This divide, between what Kashmir makes and what Kashmir keeps, says more about the valley’s economy than any story about missing talent or missing effort.

Start with the numbers, because they are blunt. 

Jammu and Kashmir’s per-capita income for 2025-26 is estimated near ₹1,68,243, against a national figure close to ₹2.27 lakh. The region’s output is roughly 26 percent below the country’s, even as its Gross State Domestic Product touches ₹2.8567 lakh crore and grows at a genuinely healthy 5.82 percent after inflation. 

J&K’s population was about one percent of India’s in the 2011 Census, but it produces closer to 0.8 percent of national output. 

Growth is real, but the share of what that growth returns to ordinary households is not.

It helps to clear away one story first. The claim that Kashmiris once wore “one pajama for four persons” is an exaggeration that has calcified into folk memory, rather than a fact of history.

What families actually wore were pherans and woollens, layered against a mountain winter, practical enough to hold a kangri underneath. 

Poor households patched and reused clothing, as poor households did across the subcontinent before Independence, when the National Planning Committee of 1936 catalogued........

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