Kashmir\\\'s famed carpets ruined in $5b flood losses

FE Team | Published: September 23, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

SRINAGAR, India, Sept 22 (AFP) : Caked with mud and soaked in putrid water, Qazi Mohammad Yahya's ruined handmade carpets and Pashmina shawls reflect Indian Kashmir's economic devastation from the region's worst floods in a century.
More than 450 people were killed when the floods, triggered by heavy monsoon rains, swept this month through the Himalayan region and into neighbouring Pakistan, leaving hundreds of villages submerged and tens of thousands of residents homeless.
As the waters recede and the clean up finally begins, business owners, including those selling Indian Kashmir's most famous exports, are beginning to count their losses-at least $5 billion by conservative estimates.
"My 35 years of earning is gone," Yahya said outside his home in the picturesque region's main city of Srinagar as water-logged carpets collected from one of his showrooms were unloaded from a truck.
"The loss is incalculable," a grim-faced Yahya added, staring at muddy bundles of what had been handspun fine cashmere wool to make Pashmina shawls.
"Most of my finest carpets are lying elsewhere in the flooded city."
Kashmir carpets have traditionally been a major earner for the region, whose generations of weavers toil for months on wooden looms to produce single intricate pieces that sell for thousands of dollars in the West.
Carpets and other handicraft businesses have long thrived even as the troubled Muslim-majority region has endured an insurgency against Indian rule in favour of independence or merger with Pakistan.
But scores of carpet showrooms now lie under water after Srinagar's Dal Lake burst its banks, sending residents fleeing for higher ground. Many of the handlooms have also been destroyed and hundreds of people are out of work.