The Curfew Clock and the Kiln That Never Sleeps

The Labour Vacuum That Land Reform Left Behind This is not the

first time land reform in India has created a workforce it never intended to build. Kerala did something similar a generation earlier - its land reforms of 1957 and 1969 redistributed holdings so thoroughly that manual agricultural labour, once plentiful and cheap, became something local families increasingly refused to do.

Kerala solved the resulting labour shortage the same way Jammu and Kashmir has: by importing it, at scale, from Bihar, Odisha, Assam and West Bengal, until interstate migrants became structurally load-bearing for the state's economy.

Kashmir's version of this story is quieter in its cause but louder in its consequence. The Agrarian Reforms Act of 1976 completed a "land to the tiller" transformation that pushed the Valley's below-poverty-line population down to just over 10%, against a national average of 22%.

That prosperity did what prosperity tends to do - it moved a generation of Kashmiris toward government service and away from brick kilns, construction sites and orchard labour, work now considered beneath the dignity a stable local economy has come to expect.

An estimated four lakh workers from outside the state now fill that gap, doing the Valley's hardest physical work for wages - ₹700 to ₹1,200 a day - that beat what they'd earn at home. Here is where the Kerala parallel breaks and breaks in a way that matters.

Kerala's migrant workforce fills an economic vacuum without facing a targeted threat for existing. Kashmir's does both at once. Since the August 2019 abrogation of Article 370, non-local workers have become, in a police officer's own words, "soft targets"

• over 20 killed and 20 injured in the seven years since, most recently two brick kiln workers in Kulgam in late July 2026. The same men who fill a labour vacuum created by decades of relative local prosperity are now paying a security cost that prosperity never had to. What makes this worth an aspirant's attention isn't the security story alone - that's the visible half. It's the structural half sitting underneath it: a state can lift its own population out of poverty and, in doing so, quietly make itself permanently dependent on workers who arrive from outside precisely because that poverty no longer exists at home. The 7 pm curfew and the brick kiln that still needs to run by sunrise aren't in tension by accident. They're the same economic story, told from two different sides of it.