Umaisar Gull Ganie
Srinagar: While the successive government has been struggling for decades to ensure the availability of essential commodities in Kashmir in winter, the traders ascribe the problem to lack of proper planning by the authorities.
The stakeholders have raised a pitch for establishing advanced storage facilities in the Valley for winter.
Comparatively, the Kashmir Valley which is connected to rest of the world by a mountainous 300 km highway and 14 flights a day, face a severe shortage of essential commodities whenever it starts snowing heavily.
Almost all the essential commodities ranging from cooking gas, food items disappear from the market with a snowfall closing the Srinagar-Jammu highway.
However, most of Kashmir based traders believe that the problem is not wholly an off-shoot of Srinagar-Jammu highway closure, but a sheer result of lack of proper planning by the local Government to store essential in the Valley before the onset of winter.
Sheikh Ashiq Hussain President of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) told news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) that there is no proper planning from the government side and every year in winter people face a shortage of essential commodities.
“From decades government has failed to complete even 30 kilometres of the national highway. The government must complete the pending work on the national highway at an earliest so that we won’t face problems every year,” he said.
Meanwhile, Director of Food Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs (FCS&CA) Bashir Ahmad Bhat, he said that there is no dearth of any essential commodities and there is enough stock for 20 days.
“People shouldn’t create panic and cooperate with the administration,” he said—(KNO)
