As major road and rail projects expand across Kashmir, agricultural land is increasingly caught between acquisition and restriction. The Srinagar Semi Ring Road has introduced construction-free buffer zones that prevent farmers from building, selling, or investing — without fully acquiring their land.

In this episode of The Witness, we walk alongside Saqib, a young farmer observing the quiet transformation of his village. As buffer zones reshape ownership and planning policies redefine value, agricultural land becomes something suspended — cultivated, yet shadowed.

Through farmer testimonies and insights from a Kashmiri political anthropologist, this episode examines how infrastructure projects reorganize not just geography, but livelihoods, law, and memory.

🎧 Produced as part of the Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

Further reading: https://sajadrasool.com/land-farmers-and-futures-in-kashmir/