Worth Reading: Kashmir’s Lotus Stems Rise Again | A Story Worth Sharing

In Kashmir, where apple orchards often dominate conversations about climate-driven crop losses, a quieter agricultural shift is unfolding in the wetlands of this Himalayan region.

Farmers are reviving nadur, or lotus stem, a crop that once sustained families across the region and nearly disappeared under pollution, floods and erratic weather. What is bringing it back is not a program or new technology, but farmers working with water instead of trying to force it away.

For generations, lotus stem was harvested in winter from the shallow marshes of lakes such as Dal and Wular. Pulled from soft silt and slow-moving water, it was woven into daily life, cooked as a vegetable, fried into the street snack nadur monji, or preserved in pickles. The crop also anchored livelihoods. Women often handled processing and sales, providing households with steady winter income.

But this system has fallen apart over the past decade. Urban encroachment, sewage, rising temperatures and floods such as the disastrous ones that the region suffered in 2014 have clogged wetlands with debris and silt. Water levels have become erratic, aquatic life has declined and lotus cultivation has slowly faded. By the late 2010s, many families had stopped harvesting lotus altogether, turning away from the water that had long sustained them.

Ghulam Nabi Dar, 68, watched this unfold along the edge of Wular Lake in Bandipora, a town on the water’s northern banks. His two-hectare patch once yielded enough lotus stem to feed his family and supply local markets. By 2020, repeated crop failures had left his lake plot unproductive. “The water changed,” Dar says. “It became thick, dark. Lotus wouldn’t grow.”

Instead of waiting for large-scale restoration projects, Dar turned to knowledge passed down from his grandfather, who farmed lotus in the same waters decades earlier. In early 2021, Dar began cleaning his section of the lake himself.

Using handmade reed nets, shovels and family labor, he spent months removing silt and waste from shallow waters. He revived an old technique of stirring the lakebed with long poles to oxygenate the soil and help roots take hold. No chemicals. No machines. Just patience and repetition. “It was slow work,” Dar says. “But the water started responding.”

Aquatic plants returned first, followed by small fish. By winter, lotus roots had re-established. Dar harvested 12 quintals (a unit used in agriculture for measuring crop yields, one quintal is the equivalent of about 100kg) that season, earning about 1.5 lakh (approximately $1,600).

Neighbors noticed. Farmers from nearby villages waded into Dar’s plot to see the revived stems for themselves. Dar shared his methods openly. By 2023, at least 15 households across three villages had restored their own lake patches, pooling labor, tools and harvests. What began as an individual effort turned into a small, cooperative movement, farmer-to-farmer, without formal funding or oversight.

The idea did not stop at open water. Elsewhere in the region, farmers dealing with a different climate challenge — prolonged waterlogging in low-lying fields — were reaching a similar conclusion.

In Khonmoh, a village near the town of Pampore, Abdul Ahad Wani, 75, had spent years watching his paddy fields fail. Erratic rainfall, degraded drainage and shrinking wetlands left water standing around young crops until harvests were lost. “Paddy needs less water as it matures,” Wani says. “But my land never dried.”

After yet another failed season, Wani had a realization: The same water ruining his paddy could support lotus. “Lotus needs water all the time,” he says. He began asking other farmers for advice and eventually connected with a young cultivator in Sopore who had already converted flooded land to lotus production. Within a week, the farmer visited Wani’s field and helped him sow lotus roots.

“Farmers growing lotus stem on waterlogged land is a strong adaptive response to climate change,” says Ajaz Rasool, a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Wetland Authority and Chief Advisor at the Wetland Research Centre, which supports research on wetland ecology. “Lotus thrives in conditions where paddy increasingly fails, and it offers significantly higher economic returns.”

Instead of keeping the knowledge to himself, Wani shared what he learned. Within a year, several neighboring farmers had converted waterlogged paddy fields into lotus plots of their own.

Nearby, Ghulam Mohammad Beigh’s family followed the same path. Their land, long considered unusable, produced lotus stem in its first season. Beigh’s wife, Haleema, now leads processing, frying nadur monji and preparing pickles for local markets. “When lotus disappeared, women lost work,” she says. “Now it’s coming back.”

According to Rasool, farmers who are already making this shift on their own deserve recognition and support. “This is where the government should step in, not to replace local knowledge but to strengthen it through technical help, market access and wetland protection,” he says.

This regenerative model, where farmers are restoring ecosystems by working with natural processes rather than against them, is modest and labor-intensive, and does not replace the need for broader wetland protection or infrastructure reform. But it offers something often missing from climate conversations: A practical, place-based response that communities can control.

Wetlands are vanishing at an alarming rate, disappearing nearly three times faster than forests, with around 35 percent already lost worldwide since 1970. Against that backdrop, Kashmir’s lotus revival shows how adaptation can emerge from local knowledge and collective effort rather than large-scale intervention alone.

“We work with the water now,” Wani says, lifting freshly harvested stems. “And slowly, it’s working with us.”

Scrolling photos courtesy of Rainbow_dazzle / Shutterstock, Safina Nabi and Firdous Qadri / Shutterstock.