WMC Climate

Massive Snowfall Brings ‘Nothing More Than Miseries’ to Women in Kashmir

Photo 1
Dumail’s women have to walk for hours, through snaking roads buried under snow, to find firewood and water for their families’ needs. (Raihana Maqbool)

DUMAIL, INDIAN ADMINISTERED KASHMIR — At 20 degrees Fahrenheit, Misra Begum, 35, a mother of three, sits beside a small lake in the northern Indian village of Naranag and washes a bucket of clothes in the freezing water. Two of her children are beside her.

Begum lives in the village of Dumail, in central Kashmir’s Ganderbal district, nearly 40 miles from the city of Srinagar. The village is under three feet of snowfall after a recent storm, and it has made the narrow, winding road up to Dumail even more difficult to pass than usual, particularly for women.

Dumail’s women have to walk for hours, through snaking roads buried under snow, to find firewood and water for their families’ needs, all the while at risk of being buried by sudden avalanches. They fill containers with water from nearby rivers or any public tap, carrying them home through the icy hills on their heads.

“I have to bring clothes to the lake and wash them here with cold water every week,” Begum says. “After that, I have to take the water home by going uphill. With difficulty, I manage to get the water home, but there is a risk I can fall and break my bones.”

For nearly three decades, the region has seen heavy snowfall, extreme cold, and harsh weather overall. In January, the temperature in the Shopian district of Jammu and Kashmir fell to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest day recorded in 30 years, according to the Meteorological Department in Kashmir. Scientists link this increase in freezing weather and snowfall to climate change.

The global increase in temperatures “leads to changes in precipitation patterns including an increase in heavy precipitation and a decrease in low or moderate precipitation,” researchers wrote in a 2017 article for the journal Weather.

“Increasing temperatures lead to an increase in the water holding capacity of the atmosphere,” which, they wrote, can cause “an increase in precipitation intensity as a result of the release of extra latent heat. It has been reported that increasing global temperature has resulted in an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme snowfall events in a number of regions worldwide.”

And the fallout of this extreme amount of snow has very real-life impacts.

Researchers have found that the recent extreme weather patterns in Kashmir have not only impacted ecosystems but have also seriously harmed the economy. “Over the past few years, Kashmir Valley witnessed two such erratic snowfall events, in late autumn 2018 and 2019 — both events destroyed apple orchards across the valley,” they wrote in a 2020 article for the journal Sustainability.

Most of the women in these remote villages — particularly women of the Gujjars and Bakerwals tribe, who live in temporary huts on the mountains — have rare, if any, access to drinking water, electricity and health care.

“The women in these areas get water four to five times a day, following the same route and routine,” says Zafoora Begum, who lives in Dumail. “Sometimes, we have to break the ice of the river.”

Access to maternal health care

Dilshada Bano, 27, who lives in the adjacent Naranag village in Ganderbal, is eight months pregnant. Bano’s worries only increase as she nears her delivery date of her first child.

“I have delivery in a month, and I worry each day whether I will be able to reach the hospital in time or not,” Bano says. “The hospital is 50 miles away, and to reach the main road, I have to walk half an hour through a rough terrain in this season.” Then she would have to take public transport, or book a private car — if one is available.

Muhammad Younis, in a far off village in South Kashmir’s Shopian district, said that his sister-in-law delivered her baby on a road in January, as heavy snowfall engulfed the village. There was no way to reach a maternity hospital on time.

“These incidents are common in our village, because in winters we get cut off for weeks,” he said. “There is no nearby hospital and the clearance of snow is very slow. While some women are lucky to survive, some don’t.”

Recently, there have been dozens of cases of women being carried on their families’ shoulders in the absence of transport or snow clearance.

Raja Muzaffar Bhat, a social activist based in Kashmir, said that this year’s winter has been particularly brutal, and the Indian-administered government has not done much to help the women.

“This year’s winter was very harsh, but if there were interventions by the authorities at the right time, it would have made a difference,” Bhat said.

Misra Begum, 35, washes clothes in the freezing water of a small lake in Dumail. (Raihana Maqbool)

Keeping homes warm is a woman’s burden

The women of the Himalayas are braving it out — because they have no other choice — in the cold temperatures. They are stepping up and taking risks under extreme conditions to care for their households.

Gulnaaz Bano, 16, lives in a small mud hut that is shared by her family and her uncle’s family, in Naranag village. Gulnaaz said that surviving the winters in her village is a tough.

“People may enjoy the winter and snow in other places, but for people like us, it brings nothing more than miseries,” Gulnaaz said. “We have no amenities at home — there’s no water, no wood.”

A report by UN Women Watch, an interagency taskforce agrees with everything these woman have said: “Faced with a lack of services and infrastructure, rural women carry a great part of the burden of providing water and fuel for their households.”

As one peer-reviewed 2018 study called “Empowerment of Rural women: A Study of Kashmir Valley” put it: The position of rural women in Jammu and Kashmir is “unbearable.”



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