Jehangir Ali 
Dirhama (Anantnag, Kashmir): When Ghulam Mohammad Bhat reached the sprawling rice field, a small patch of land had been marked with a cross of limestone powder – the only visible sign of a visit by officials surveying the land for building India’s highest railway network in Kashmir.
“This is the centre of the railway station,” says Abdul Gaffar Bhat, a farmer, on a warm December afternoon at Dirhama village of south Kashmir, pointing to the white cross in the paddy field.
On the left and the right, stretched out across hundreds of kanal of land (one kanal is about 505.85 square metres), are mature apple orchards, thriving paddy fields and small vegetable gardens which are going to be levelled to lay down a railway line to the Pahalgam health resort.
Perched at 8,990 feet in the eco-fragile Lidder valley, which is also home to the holy Amarnath cave, Pahalgam is set to become the highest railway station in India, beating Ghum railway station (7,407 feet) in West Bengal’s Darjeeling district.
Residents of Dirhama, one of more than a dozen villages set to be affected by the railway line, told The Wire that officials have demarcated their land during multiple visits over the last year.
The railway line to Pahalgam cuts through thriving agricultural fields, like the hybrid apple farm captured here, which are the only source of sustenance for most farmers of Dirhama. Photo: Jehangir Ali
The railway line was unveiled by the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP)-led Union government when railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told the Lok Sabha on December 20, 2023, that his ministry had approved the ‘Final Location Survey’ of five new railway lines in Kashmir valley.
Among them is the 77.5 km Anantnag-Pahalgam line which will cut through thriving agricultural fields spread on the Lidder river basin in the fertile foothills of Lesser Himalayas in south Kashmir.
Situated some 70 kilometres south of Kashmir’s capital city Srinagar, Dirhama will host the penultimate railway station on the Pahalgam line but villagers say that they had no information about the project and no one had been consulted by the government.
“The officials used to come with files and measuring tapes. Recently, they erected two concrete pillars on either side of the land. Some say that a railway station will be built here. But we won’t allow the government to steal our land like this. We have not signed up for this,” says Bhat.
A resident of Dirhama, Bhat owns around 10 kanal of land in the village where he cultivates rice and apples throughout the year. He says the earnings are sufficient to meet the yearly household budget. His farm profits also took care of his two daughters’ marriages, while the paddy field and a small vegetable garden provided a year-round supply of rice and fresh vegetables.
“Both my sons have crossed the age of employment. Their blood and sweat have gone into taking care of our land. If the government takes it away, we will be thrown on the road. I have two more daughters. How am I going to pay for their marriage? How am I going to feed my family?” Bhat asks.
A majority of Dirhama’s residents are farmers like Bhat who cultivate apples and rice for yearly sustenance. Although locals claim that the youngsters in the village were well-educated with masters and higher degrees, few have jobs.
For the villagers, the white cross of limestone in the midst of a paddy farm has become a perpetual reminder of a looming disaster.
An old woman offers a glass of water to another woman who broke down while narrating that her family was going to lose their apple orchard and paddy land to the railway project. Photo: Jehangir Ali
Mohammad Ramzan Dar, another Dirhama resident, said that the government hasn’t taken the consent of villagers. “Why is the government prioritising a railway line over the livelihood of our families? Our children will curse us for allowing this injustice to take place. Forget livelihood, we won’t even have a graveyard for burying our dead,” he says.
One of the longest, and arguably the most difficult, networks to lay down among the five announced by the BJP-led Union government, the Pahalgam railway line, according to a route plan, branches out from the Anantnag-Bijbehara section of the unfinished Udhampur-Baramulla railway line and culminates at what would be one of the world’s 15 highest railway stations.
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A map of the proposed alignment shows that there would be three major tunnels (13.8 km, 9.2 km and 6.7 km) and one minor tunnel (200 m), which are going to be drilled through the heart of Kashmir’s three major wildlife and forest ecosystems – Overa-Aru and Tral wildlife sanctuaries and Khillan forests.
The Wire couldn’t independently verify the authenticity of the map.
According to officials, railway projects which fall under Section 11 of the Railways Act, 1989, are exempt from the requirement of environment and coastal regulatory zone clearances.
However, in April this year, the Supreme Court struck down a 2016 notification issued by the environment ministry that exempted soil extraction for road and railways projects from environmental clearance (EC).
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Under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (RFCTLARR), the government is bound by law to carry out social impact assessment and environmental impact assessment surveys before setting such projects into action. It was not immediately known whether these surveys had been carried out.
Jammu and Kashmir’s former advocate general Isaac Qadri said that the consent of villagers was not legally required for “public infrastructure” projects. Qadri said that the government could provide compensation to the affected farmers under “constitutional arrangements”.
“After the reading down of Article 370, owning a property has ceased to be a fundamental right in Jammu and Kashmir. Besides, when a project is implemented for public benefit, law or people can’t stand in the way of development,” he said.
Environmental activists, however, argue that the railway line would wipe away large tracts of fertile land from the Lidder basin between Dachnipora and Khoverpora belts of Anantnag district, and parts of Tral. It includes the villages of Khairbugh, Okra, Balpora, Dirhama, Adlech, Pethno, Laiseer, Kothus, Liver, Salar, Kolar and Movra, which are home to small farming families.
For a one-kilometre railway line, around 30 kanal of land is required, according to an estimate. This would mean that for the 77-km Pahalgam line, the government will have to acquire 2,310 kanal land, excluding the land required for eight railway stations, like the one proposed for Dirhama.
However, another estimate puts the figure much higher. For the 119-km Qazigund-Baramulla railway line, over 16,000 kanal of mostly agricultural land was acquired by the government and more than Rs 600 crore was paid in compensation. At this rate, the Pahalgam railway line would require more than 10,352 kanal of land.
A Srinagar-based economist and former dean of Social Sciences at the University of Kashmir says that most farmers in Kashmir have small agricultural land holdings which sustain their livelihoods.
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“We have seen how some really poor villages convulsed in a construction boom when the Baramulla-Qazigund railway line was built and the government gave fat compensation to the affected farmers. After some years, many of these farmers were working for daily wages and had become poorer due to loss of land,” says the economist on the condition of anonymity.
A 2021 report noted that Kashmir has been losing its agricultural land rapidly. According to an official survey, 78,700 hectares or 15.4 lakh kanal farm land has been used for non-agricultural purposes from 2015 to 2021 with much of it gulped by unplanned private residential and commercial projects, roads and highways, and now railway lines.
The Pahalgam railway line will also intrude on the fragile ecosystem of the wildlife sanctuaries and forests which fall in Lidder valley, posing a threat to its rich biodiversity and micro-climate systems.
Environmental activist and writer Raja Muzaffar Bhat said that the government should carry out a survey to assess the impact of the Pahalgam railway line on lives and livelihoods.
“These farmers have no other source of earning and there is no information about how they are going to be rehabilitated. In the name of development, the railway project violates all the laws related to land use, construction and environment,” he says, adding that farmers would find it difficult to cope with the loss of land.
A farmer helping a labourer to collect twigs of apple trees after a day of pruning in his orchard in Dirhama village. Photo: Jehangir Ali
Divisional commissioner of Kashmir, Vijay Kumar Bidhuri could not be reached for comment. Sajad Pervez, sub-divisional magistrate of Sirgufwara, which covers Dirhama and other adjoining villages, told The Wire that he was not aware of the project.
For the Union government, the railway network to Pahalgam provides an opportunity to open a seamless route for thousands of Hindu pilgrims who undertake the treacherous journey from Srinagar to the holy Amarnath cave every year.
The saffron party could use the Pahalgam railway project as a political weapon to fire at its detractors of the “complete integration” policy on Kashmir.
Meanwhile, for the farmers of Dirhama, the project has raised concerns about survival. Gulzar Ahmad, an apple farmer, says that he had mortgaged his apple orchard for a Rs 20 lakh loan which went into his wife’s kidney transplant surgery.
Over the last few years, Ahmad has managed to pay off some amount of the loan with profits from the apple harvest.
“They (government) will give us compensation (for land), but it won’t last forever. The orchard provided us enough for sustenance but if the government takes it away, what will happen to me and my family?” he asks.