News stories by Sana Altaf, page 2

Increased education and employment opportunities for women in Kashmir might have brought monetary independence and a degree of empowerment but it also has women ensnared in a vicious trap of domestic violence.

The saffron and silk industries in Kashmir have been dying a silent death over the last decade, with production rates for both commodities witnessing up to 50 percent declines in some areas of the Kashmir Valley.

Fourteen-year-old Shafat Ahmad works as a domestic helper in the house of a Srinagar-based government employee in Kashmir. His younger sister embroiders shawls in an unregistered textile venture in her native village of Beeru.

'Is Afzal Guru really the person that so many Indians supposedly want dead? Or are they taking out their frustrations on an easy target?' asked Human Rights Watch, referring to the death sentence handed down to the Kashmiri man who was convicted of conspiracy in the 2001 suicide attack on the Indian Parliament.

When the sole Community Care Centre in Jammu and Kashmir providing medical and psychosocial services to people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) closed down for lack of patients it was a sure sign that the north Indian state had beaten back dire forecasts.

Kashmir’s juvenile justice system is sorely deficient for a state ridden with a long, and often violent, separatist conflict that attracts youth, say lawyers and rights activists.

If films are the voice of society, then Indian Kashmir is mute, with a virtually non-existent film industry and the subsequent inability to nurture local talent.

At a time when information technology has revolutionised life across the globe, Kashmir in north India lags behind the rest of the country, and the world, because it has no IT industry to speak of.

Thousands of people have died in 20 years of turmoil in Kashmir in northern India, but the conflict seems to have spared the animal population, particularly the severely endangered Kashmir stag or 'hangul' whose population has grown in recent years.