Saffron farmers in Patalbagh village in the Pampore tehsil of Kashmir's Pulwama district say rats drawn by a landfill beside the highway are destroying the underground corms of their crop, forcing some to give up saffron altogether. Residents estimate that about 120 hectares across Patalbagh and the neighbouring villages of Chandahra, Sombura and Kandizal are affected, and that a fifth of Patalbagh's farmers have stopped growing it.
Mohammad Jabbar earned Rs 3-4 lakh a year from saffron on 0.4 hectares until 2022, when the 3-hectare landfill opened about 200 metres from his field, he told Down To Earth. Residents say some 50 mini-trucks of fresh waste arrive from Pampore every day. Within months rats were burrowing into fields and eating the corms before they flowered. Jabbar switched to apples in 2023, which earn him a little over Rs 1 lakh a harvest, but rats now climb the trees and kites from the dump damage the fruit.
Another farmer, Mohammad Maqbool, has left a 0.1-hectare plot fallow since 2024 and says rats are reaching his second field 500 metres away; the corms contain sugar, which attracts them. Resident Rahil Rashid says saffron can no longer be grown within 300 metres of the landfill, and that most saffron fields sit on sloping upland that is unsuited to other crops.
Pampore produces the largest share of Pulwama's saffron, which is promoted under the One District One Product scheme and carries a Geographical Indication tag as Kashmir saffron. A 2018 study put saffron cultivation in Jammu and Kashmir at 3,785 hectares, 85 per cent of it in Pulwama.
Officials disagree. The executive officer of the Pampore Municipal Committee, Mohammad Ismail Mir, says the land was allotted for waste disposal and machinery is being installed for scientific disposal. Safir Hussain Shah, regional director of the Jammu and Kashmir Pollution Control Committee, says the landfill is illegal and is being investigated for environmental compensation. Activist Raja Muzaffar Bhat plans to take the case to the National Green Tribunal, which in August ordered Awantipora's municipal committee to pay Rs 33.24 lakh over a similar dump, and wants any penalty shared among the affected farmers. The report is by Bhagirath.
Photo: Umarsami / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Down To Earth
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