by Masood Hussain
SHOPIAN: In the apple capital of Kashmir, the mood has soured. For the second consecutive day, as the traders at Shopian’s main fruit mandi refused to accept harvests, the town is literally buried under apple-laden trucks as an unending line is desperately approaching the Mughal Road, the alternative link of Kashmir to the rest of the world.
The sprawling yard at Aglar, which should have been buzzing with the clang of loading trucks and the chatter of commission agents, now lies in uneasy silence, punctuated only by growers sitting beside crates of fruit that no one will buy.
“We cannot take even a single kilo,” a trader said bluntly. “What will we do with it? We have no transport.”
The refusal is unprecedented, and it points to a deeper crisis. This season’s bumper harvest has collided with a logistical bottleneck that could leave tonnes of fruit rotting in the Valley. At the centre of it is the slide-prone Jammu Srinagar National Highway that lost a stretch to the rains almost three weeks ago.
The highway remains Kashmir’s Achilles’ heel. NH44, the only all-weather road link to the rest of India, has been battered by rains and landslides since late August. A 270-kilometre journey that once took five hours now drags into 12 or more, often stretching into days. The worst choke point is a 250-metre stretch at Thrad in Udhampur. Here, a single truck can take six minutes to crawl across unstable rocky terrain, tyres often bursting on the rough surface. National Highway Authority officials admit the road is unstable and say months of work will be needed for full restoration.
As the National Highway Authority of India saw the repairs taking too much of time, given the snail pace at which they work, the railways were offered as an alternative.
“Grateful to Hon’ble Prime Minister Sh @narendramodi ji for ushering a new era of trade & business for apple growers & traders of Valley. It’ll significantly reduce transit time & increase income opportunities for thousands of farmers & boost agricultural economy of the region,” Jammu Kashmir LG, Manoj Sinha wrote on twitter in the morning. “Flagged off the first dedicated Parcel Train from Budgam to Adarsh Nagar Delhi. This new freight train service is a big step for the apple growers of the Union Territory to transport their produce to different parts of the country.”
Officials in the Northern Railways said the parcel train will be able to take 23 to 24 tons of load daily. “It is just a parcel coach that is attached to the passenger train,” one informed railway official said. “It is not a goods train.”
“This is a welcome step,” Shakeel Ahmad, the Secretary General of the Shopian Mandi said. “How much will it take out daily, almost a truckload.”
Kashmir produces more than 20 lakh tons of apples a season, and of this, almost 16 lakh tons are marketed through the vast network of mandis across India. A simple calculation suggests that with 23 tons a day, it would take nearly 190 years to transport the Valley’s 16 lakh tons of apples out of Kashmir.
When the Udhampur–Srinagar–Baramulla line was declared complete, it was touted as a game-changer for the apple economy. Special freight corridors, refrigerated wagons, and seamless access to mandis across India were promised. But in reality, the railways’ apple-carrying capacity from this season is nothing much beyond a good photograph.
For growers in Shopian, Pulwama, Kulgam, and Baramulla, the arithmetic borders on the absurd. “We were told trains would take our apples directly to Delhi. But this is a joke. Twenty-three tons is less than what one mandi like Shopian handles in 30 minutes,” said Bashir Ahmad, a grower who has already lost two truckloads of fruit to delays. “It is just a truckload and in harvest seasons, Kashmir sends tens of thousands of trucks daily.”
Shopian alone produces nearly a third of Kashmir’s apples. Every September, its mandi turns into a whirl of trucks, crates, and buyers from Punjab, Delhi, and Maharashtra. This year, however, the chain has snapped. With trucks unavailable and railways offering symbolic runs, commission agents say they have no way to ship fruit out.
On the mandi floor, stacks of wooden and cardboard boxes give off the sharp smell of ripening apples. Growers hover nearby, some bargaining, others pleading. “Every crate left here is money lost. We spend the whole year in this orchard. If it doesn’t move, what will we eat?” said Waseem Ahmad, a grower from Herman village.
The disruption is not just about income; it is about survival. Apple cultivation sustains nearly 35 lakh people across Jammu and Kashmir, feeding the local economy with an annual turnover of more than Rs 17,000 crore. The sector is woven into every layer of rural life, from school fees and dowries to health expenses and small loans.
The problem is not confined to Shopian. In Pulwama, Kulgam, and Anantnag, growers report identical scenes, mandis clogged with crates, buyers reluctant to lift consignments, and transport bottlenecks worsening by the day. In Sopore, known as Kashmir’s fruit basket, traders say arrivals are down not because the crop is smaller, but because farmers cannot move their harvest to the mandi at all.
The economic ripple is already visible. Prices at Delhi’s Azadpur mandi, the country’s largest fruit market, have begun to dip, reflecting irregular and delayed arrivals from Kashmir. “If arrivals are late, demand falls, and quality drops. It’s a lose-lose for everyone,” explained a buyer from Delhi who usually sources directly from Shopian.
For growers, this translates into catastrophe. “We have 100,000 boxes ready but no transport,” said Shakeel Ahmad, Secretary General of Shopian Fruit Mandi. “One thousand trucks are stuck on the highway, and the apples are rotting inside.” He explained that the government’s alternative, allowing only sixty-tyre trucks on the Mughal Road, offers little respite. “A six-tyre carries only 600 boxes, while bigger 10-tyre and 14-tyre trucks carry double. And the Mughal Road is open just four hours a day.” He claimed they have barely 4 hours of access to the Mughal Road.
Interestingly, Shopian town is right now buried under trucks as hundreds of apple-laden truckloads are approaching the Mughal Road. Since the movement is slow, as the Kashmir-bound traffic was permitted first, the entire belt is frozen as no movement is possible.
This is mainly the reason why the mandis are closed across Kashmir. “If we purchase, where will we keep?” one Sopore trader said. “We are telling growers to delay harvesting, and that is another loss.”
Traders warn that if the situation is not resolved quickly, losses could spiral into thousands of crores. More than money, it could erode the confidence of growers who form the backbone of Kashmir’s rural economy.
“Every day lost is a crop lost,” said Bashir Ahmad, staring at his unsold crates. “This is not just about apples. This is about our lives.”
The losses are staggering. Manzoor Ahmad, an orchardist, recounted sending a truckload that returned with rotten fruit, wiping out Rs 16 lakh. “Now another truck worth Rs 25 lakh is ready, but I doubt it will fetch even half,” he said. “Earlier, our worry was prices. This year, the crisis is whether the crop can reach the market at all.”
As crates pile up in Shopian’s mandi and the railways continue to operate token freight runs, one question grows sharper: who will move Kashmir’s apples this season?
