Why crop insurance has failed Kashmir’s fruit economy

₹15,000-crore fruit economy, trapping apple growers in a cycle of rising input costs and recurring losses, even as the promise of crop insurance remains largely theoretical.Weighed down by low enthusiasm after another season of heavy losses, fruit growers have begun the new farming cycle, pruning apple trees in their orchards, amid Chilai Kalan, Kashmir's harshest forty days of winter.In Allaiepora village of Pulwama, Khursheed Ahmad Allaie tells Mint that the apple growers who once invested heavily in establishing high-density orchards, converting paddy fields into apple farms, now find themselves at a loss, as the impacts of the climate crisis have intensified over the past decade.“Global warming has changed everything. Heatwaves bring disease.

Hailstorms destroy crop quality. Apples that should be A-grade become C-grade, bringing only losses to growers,” says the 34-year-old while pointing to the scars on his trees, in his 15-kanal orchard, left by last August’s extreme weather.“The gamble that once promised higher yields and faster returns has increasingly become a source of anxiety and debt,” he says, seated near a heap of apples—decayed brown, soft, slick with rot, adding that without crop insurance, growers like him have little option but to watch their produce spoil, absorbing the losses in silence.Further south, in Katrasoo in Kulgam, Mohammad Yousuf Bhat sets out on the narrow path to his 12-kanal orchard.

His steps crunch on frozen soil as he passes rows of high-density plantations and decades-old traditional trees, their bare branches trembling in the cold wind. “Crop insurance is our security.

Without it, apple farming is just a gamble.”Bhat’s family has tended these orchards for nearly 80 years. Each