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Nayla Khwaja is an independent journalist who covers stories of land-rights, community resilience, environment, and gendered violence. Through writing and visual storytelling, she attempts to bring marginalised voices to the centre. A graduate of Jamia Milia Islamia’s AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, she has worked across media and advocacy spaces as a coordinator and communication officer.

For issue #159 of The Internationalist, she reports on how relentless climate disasters and political instability are devastating India's apple heartland and the livelihoods of millions dependent on it.

This is Part 1 of this report; Part 2 will be published next week.

“Byaakh toofaana eeha ti baaki sori ti gasiha wasith,” (if only there is another storm, so the remaining rotten apples fall by themselves) said Sana Ullah Dar, an apple orchardist from Kachdoorah village in Shopian – a district in India administered state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) – referring to the devastation caused by a hailstorm in south Kashmir villages.

Earlier in 2024, when the soil started to warm up, Sana Ullah knew the apple crop was blooming vibrantly this season. The region has seen the longest internet shutdowns to heavy militarisation, curtailed mobility, communication blackouts and further shrinking space for dissent, when J&K’s autonomous status was revoked in August 2019. 

However, despite facing many socio-political challenges over the last five to six years, Sana Ullah ensured proper irrigation, pest control, and the thinning of excess fruit for healthy growth. The orchards were brimming with life until an untimely hailstorm hit the south Kashmir villages in September. With once vibrant orchards reduced to a shattered landscape, the battered fruit falls prematurely from the gnarled branches, with the trees stripped of their harvest. Soon, he made a last desperate bet, sending away all the seasonal labourers who migrate to work in these orchards. Now, at 65, he finds himself doing all the labour alone, weighed down by the debts of the year’s production costs and the wages owed to the migrant workers.

Once lush and promising fruit lies bruised and forgotten on the ground in a hailstorm-hit orchard of Kachdoorah village.

THE 2025 CATASTROPHE

The Kashmir apple growers could barely recover from previous year’s hailstorms and highway blockades when the torrential rains, followed by massive floods, hit the apple belts of Kashmir (Pulwama and Kulgam) and Himachal (Kullu, Mandi, Shimla) in August-September 2025. In Kashmir, the Jhelum River and the Lidder stream breached their banks, submerging orchards and uprooting trees. Similarly, three hundred kilometers away in Himachal, the Beas River turned into a predator. The Mandi (Market) Associations estimate the loss incurred right before harvesting season due to widespread crop damage had reached 600-700 crore and 2,743 lakhs, respectively. 

Heavy rains, landslides and floods caused severe transportation disruptions with 397 roads and three national highways closing for a long period of time. Therefore, transportation paralysis across the major apple-producing areas of Himachal – particularly Kullu, Mandi, Shimla – and Kashmir, due to the closure of the National Highway 44, which connects the valley to the rest of the country, has not only crippled apple growers but also traders, labourers, drivers, and other middlemen in the apple ecosystem.

Baljeet Singh, a truck driver from Punjab who regularly transports apple-laden trucks from Kashmir to Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, said, “During the peak season, around 2,000 to 2,500 trucks carrying apples leave the valley each day. But it’s common for a truck to be stuck on the highway for three to four days, let alone floods and landslides. This delay often causes the fruit to spoil before it reaches the mandis.” The road blockades are especially frustrating because when the trucks don’t make it to the destination markets on time, it cuts their weekly wages, and the stale fruit doesn’t get the regular selling rates.

In case of road blockades, once the traffic conditions ease, apples flood the market at once, leading to a problem of plenty and a fall in prices, a farmer from the district of  Baramulla in Kashmir explains further. “If a market with the capacity to absorb 500 trucks daily gets 4,000 trucks on a single day, the rates crash. Our produce then sells for nothing”.

A truck being loaded and unloaded at Shopian fruit mandi.

A DECADE OF DISASTER

Over the past decade, Kashmir’s apple industry has faced many setbacks, ranging from climate disruptions to political turmoil. “The Covid-19 restrictions, before which the 2019 communication blockade after Jammu and Kashmir lost its special status, were compounded by earlier disasters like untimely snowfall in 2018 and the devastating floods of 2014,” said Sopore Fruit Mandi General Secretary, Zahoor Ahmed Tantray. 

The Kashmir region, which produces over 75% of the annual apple output for India, is heavily reliant on the apple trade, but the destruction caused by decade-long intense climate shocks like torrential rains, floods, hailstorms, highway blockades, etc., has, according to those associated with the apple trade, led to substantial losses in recent years.

Varieties of premium apple boxes at Shopian Fruit Mandi in South Kashmir, ready to be exported to southern Indian fruit mandis.

The two important regions, namely Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and Himachal Pradesh, account for 92% of the total production and about 85% of the total area under apple cultivation in India (NHB Data 2001-02). In terms of productivity, J&K has achieved the highest productivity (13 t/ha), followed by Himachal Pradesh (5-6 t/ha) and Uttarakhand (2.16 t/ha) (NHB, 2017).

As per the Agricultural Department’s response in the J&K Assembly, the annual apple production ranges between 20-21 lakh metric tonnes, whereas the Economic Survey reports indicate an average of 5-6 lakh metric tonnes of annual production in Himachal Pradesh.

Orchardists, in affected areas, speak of 100% crop damage, leaving many helpless as their year’s labour was wiped away in mere moments. The destruction in the districts of Pulwama, Kulgam, Shopian, Sopore, Baramulla, Kullu, and Mandi has forced Sana Ullah, like many others, into manual labour and daily-wage jobs to survive.

Rotten apples on the ground.

THE INVISIBLE VICTIMS

More than seven lakh families in J&K and 1.7 lakh in Himachal are directly or indirectly involved and dependent on the apple industry, which includes growers, orchardists, gardeners, packers, processors, hamal (daily-wage earners for tasks such as plucking apples from trees, carrying heavy crates, often 20-30 kg each, load and unload trucks, sort and grade apples, move boxes across orchards and mandis, assist in packing sheds, etc.,) stockists, traders, buyers, dealers, brokers, commission agents, transporters, loaders, weighmen, etc.

Amina Bano, Sumaiyya Jaan and Shehzada, farmers from Kachdoorah, talk about the devastation: Sumaiyya Jaan said, "Our entire livelihood is gone. This isn't just about today but about the future survival of our orchards. We could manage today, but we don’t have bread for tomorrow." As their husbands take up labour jobs in the city to make ends meet, she and other women are left to manage the remnants of their once-thriving orchards. She further explained to us how the fallen and rotten-but-intact apples need to be removed immediately, or else they will destroy the branches for the next season. “We do not have any money to pay hamal, we work in orchards all day,” Amina Bano said.

Bilal Ahmed (34) from Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor District has spent the past six years, from August to November, in Kashmir.  After his agricultural land was snatched away from their family a decade ago, he works as a hamal now, picking, sorting, packing and loading apples for 500-600 rupees per day. The apple season provides their primary income for the entire year.

When the 2025 floods hit, he was already in Kashmir, having borrowed 15,000 INR for initial expenses with a hope to make 80,000 to 1,00,000 INR by season’s end. But he found himself stranded. “But how do I go back empty-handed? I have a family to feed and pay school fees for children, the compensation paid from the owner’s own pocket isn’t enough for sustenance, and since he has suffered a huge loss, we cannot ask more.”

Men next to the apple boxes in Sopore Mandi of North Kashmir, ready to be loaded on trucks for export to various parts of Indian states and regions.

The seasonal labourers and daily/weekly wage-earners, who form a significant part of the apple industry’s workforce, are the first ones to absorb the shock whenever climate disasters hit agriculture or horticulture.

Agriculture faces a two-fold threat from extreme weather events: the immediate damage to crops, and the long-term decline in productivity due to the lengthy reconstruction process. One way to ensure timely, transparent, and need-based financial assistance for recovery is by roping in climate insurance. Unlike farmers’ protests in India in 2020-2021 that resulted in the repealing of unconstitutional farm reforms, landless workers have no formal associations or political representations. And yet, they’re most climate vulnerable yet policy invisible.

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