On a quiet morning in Kanihama, the village that has for centuries been synonymous with Kashmir’s most prized textile tradition, master weaver Mohammad Yusuf Bhat sits at his loom, his fingers moving with the kind of unhurried precision that only decades of practice can produce. The pashmina shawl taking shape beneath his hands — each thread drawn from the fine underbelly fleece of Changthangi goats grazing on the high plateaus of Ladakh, each motif a testament to a craft heritage older than most nations — would ordinarily have found its way to a buyer in Dubai or Riyadh within weeks of completion. Today, it joins a growing pile of finished pieces stacked carefully in a back room, exquisite and unsold, waiting for a market that has gone quiet.
“We have put months into each of these shawls. The skill, the time, the raw material — everything has gone into them,” said Bhat, running his hand over the soft folds of a finished piece. “But there is no movement. The orders have stopped, and the freight has become so expensive that even when someone wants to buy, we cannot send it at a price that makes sense. How long can we sustain this? We have families to feed.”
Bhat’s predicament is the story of an entire industry in distress. From the pashmina weaving clusters of Kanihama and Sheeri to the papier-mâché workshops of downtown Srinagar, from the sozni embroidery artisans of Budgam to the walnut wood carvers of Habbakadal, Kashmir’s celebrated handicrafts sector is confronting a crisis with two sharp edges — a dramatic collapse in demand driven by the ongoing West Asia conflict, and a crippling surge in export freight costs that has pushed an already struggling industry to the brink.
To understand the depth of the crisis, one must first understand the thread — quite literally — that connects Kashmir’s artisans to their most vital markets.
The Gulf countries — the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and their neighbours — have for generations been the most dependable destination for Kashmir’s handmade exports. Affluent Gulf buyers have a profound cultural appreciation for luxury handcrafted goods, and Kashmiri pashmina in particular has long enjoyed an almost iconic status in those markets, fetching premium prices and building enduring commercial relationships across decades.
That thread has now been stretched to near breaking point. As conflict across West Asia has disrupted trade routes, unsettled buyers, and created a climate of economic anxiety across the region, demand for Kashmiri handicrafts has fallen sharply. Exporters are holding stocks they cannot move. Artisans are waiting for payments that are not coming. And the financial year that is drawing to a close looks set to record a painful step backwards for a sector that had worked hard to reach Rs 733 crore in exports in the previous financial year.
Industry insiders now fear the current year’s figures will fall significantly short of that benchmark, with finished goods accumulating in warehouses and workshops across the Valley and no clear timeline for when normalcy might return.
President of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), Javid Ahmad Tenga, who has been leading efforts to bring the trade community’s concerns before the authorities, spoke to Greater Kashmir in unusually direct terms about the gravity of the situation and what he believes must happen next.
“The situation is very serious. There has been a drastic decline in demand directly because of the West Asia conflict. The Gulf countries are the major markets for Kashmir’s handicrafts exports. When there is instability in that region, we are the ones who bear the consequences here in Kashmir,” Tenga said.
He painted a picture of an industry caught in a vice. On one side, demand has collapsed. On the other hand, the logistics of getting goods out of Kashmir have become prohibitively expensive. Export freight charges, he said, have surged from Rs 200 per kg to Rs 1,000 per kg — a 500 percent increase that has rendered countless consignments economically unviable to dispatch even when willing buyers can be found.
“Goods are ready. The pashmina has been woven, the embroidery has been done, the craftsmen have fulfilled their part with tremendous skill and effort. But the goods are sitting here because the freight cost makes it impossible to send them at a price that remains competitive in the international market. This is a double crisis — no demand on one side and no affordable route to the demand that does exist on the other,” he said.
Tenga also disclosed that the KCCI has been actively engaging with the central government on the matter and has already placed its case formally before the concerned authorities. “Last month, we held a meeting with DGFT Lav Agrawal, where we submitted a detailed memorandum outlining the problems facing our exporters. We have put the facts on the table. Now we need the government to act,” he said.
His appeal to New Delhi was unequivocal. “The Government of India must come forward to bail out the exporters of Kashmir. These are people who contribute foreign exchange to the country — real dollars and dirhams that come into India because of the skill of our weavers and craftspeople. In these tough times, when circumstances entirely beyond their control have disrupted their markets, the government has a responsibility to stand by them. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for support for an industry that earns for the nation,” Tenga said.
On the ground, the financial bleeding is already acute. Farooq Ahmad, a Srinagar-based exporter with over two decades in the pashmina and handicrafts trade and a client list that spans the UAE and Saudi Arabia, described how the steady pipeline of orders that once defined his business calendar has reduced to an uncertain trickle.
“My buyers in Dubai and Riyadh are good people. They have been with me for years, some of them for longer than my children have been alive. But they are also businessmen. When their own environment is uncertain, when there is conflict around them, and people are worried, they do not commit to large orders for luxury goods. They wait and watch. And while they wait, I am here with a room full of finished pashmina shawls and zero cash flow,” Wani said.
He estimated that his pending stock had reached levels he had not seen in years, and said that several fellow exporters were in an even more precarious position — having made advance payments to weavers and procured raw material on credit in anticipation of orders that never materialised.
“The weavers come and ask when they will be paid the balance. The raw material suppliers ask when their dues will be cleared. What do I tell them — that a war thousands of kilometres away has frozen my business? They understand the situation, but understanding does not pay anyone’s bills,” he said.
If exporters are under severe strain, it is the artisans at the base of the supply chain who are absorbing the sharpest blow. Kashmir’s pashmina weavers — the vast majority of them women working out of home-based setups across rural districts — work largely on a piece-rate system, meaning income arrives only when finished goods are accepted and cleared. With exports stalled, that income has been indefinitely deferred.
Back in Kanihama, Naseema Akhter has been weaving pashmina since she was a teenager, learning the craft at her mother’s knee the way generations of women in her village have done before her. She has not received a full payment for her work in months.
“I finish a shawl, I hand it over, and then I wait. The person who takes it says the market is bad, that things are stuck abroad. I am not an educated woman but I know that there is trouble far away and that it has reached our doorstep. The trouble is now on my dining table, in my children’s school fees, in the ration I buy at the end of the month,” she said quietly.
In the sozni embroidery workshops of the city, where craftsmen spend weeks needle-working delicate floral patterns onto fine pashmina with a precision that has earned Kashmir’s embroidery an international reputation, the silence of idled work tells its own story. Ghulam Hassan, who runs a small embroidery unit near the Jama Masjid and employs half a dozen young craftsmen, said the Gulf orders that once kept his unit running through the year had all but disappeared.
“This craft takes years to learn and a lifetime to perfect. My boys are among the best at what they do. But excellence does not pay the rent when there are no orders. I am managing, just about — but I say honestly that I do not know for how much longer,” he said.
While the demand collapse is driven by geopolitical forces beyond the industry’s control, the explosion in freight costs is a wound that trade leaders believe the government has both the ability and the obligation to address directly.
The jump from Rs 200 per kg to Rs 1,000 per kg in export freight charges has erected what exporters are calling a freight wall between Kashmir’s artisans and their international buyers. For the finest pashmina shawls — where a single piece might be valued at tens of thousands of rupees — the logistics surcharge, while painful, can to some extent be absorbed. For the vast mid-range of Kashmir’s handicrafts output, the arithmetic simply does not work anymore.
The urgency of intervention is sharpened by what hangs in the balance. Kashmir’s handicrafts industry is not simply an economic sector — it is the living expression of a centuries-old artistic civilisation, the primary livelihood of an estimated three lakh artisan families across the Valley, and one of the most globally recognised emblems of the region’s identity. The fine pashmina shawl, in particular, is not merely a product — it is a cultural artefact that carries within its threads the accumulated knowledge and artistry of generations.
