Daybreak - The billion dollar market Kashmir can't claim

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

It takes 150 crocus flowers to make just one gram of saffron. For comparison, a spice like cumin, gets you hundreds of kilos per acre whereas saffron yields barely two.Despite getting a prestigious GI tag from the Indian government and even a National Mission dedicated to its revival, Kashmir’s saffron production has plummeted:from 8 tonnes in 2011 to just 2.7 tonnes in 2024.So what’s going wrong? And can India learn something from Iran, which currently dominates 90% of the global saffron market?Reporters Mehroob Mushtaq and Numan Bhat, traveled deep into saffron country, met the farmers, walked the fields, and came back with a story that’s rich in detail, visuals, and hard truths.Tune in.*This episode was originally published on July 21st 2025.Compete in India’s first and only case-build competition.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too? It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Today's story is going to take us to the saffron fields of Kashmir, the land known for producing the world's most expensive spice.

But behind the fragrant purple blooms lies a bitter truth. The farmers growing this luxury are getting poorer by the year. Saffrin is not just any crop. It is painstaking to grow. Imagine this. It takes 150 crocus flowers to make just one gram of saffron. Compare that to something like cumin, where you get hundreds of kilos per acre. Saffron yields barely two.

Now, despite getting the prestigious GI tag from the Indian government, and even a national mission dedicated to its revival, Kashmir's saffron production has fallen from 8 tons in 2011 to just 2.7 tons in 2024. Now, that is a steep fall. So, what is going wrong? And can India learn something from Iran, which currently dominates 90% of the global saffron market?

Our reporters, Mehrub, Mushtak and Numan Bhat, travel deep into the saffron country. They met the farmers, walk the field, and came back with a story that is rich in details, visuals and hard truths. So today, instead of our regular programming, I'm going to do something different. I'll be reading out their ground report just as it was written so you can hear the story in full in their words. This is no longer just an agricultural story. It is about an industry in decline, the people who are caught in its downturn and the uncertain future of a crop that once defined an entire.

entire region's identity. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nick Das Sharma, and I Don't Chase the News Cycle. Instead, every day of the week, I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 21st of July. Under the shadow of the Great Himalayas, Muhammad Yusuf stares at his suffering feels in quite desperation.

A resident of Pampore, Kashmir, the 58-year-old, has been cultivating saffron all his life, just like his father and grandfather before him. But if things continue as they are, he knows the future generations may never see what he is seeing. This land and its purple flowers once gave us pride. They meant everything to our family. Now the bloom is fading and so is our hope. He said, glancing at the dry, cracked patches where saffron once grew so abundantly that it hit the ground beneath. It is a lament echoed by farmers across Kashmir's saffron belt spanning Pulwama and Badgam districts,

and justifiably so. In 2024, Kashmir's total saffron production was 2.7 tonnes, about two-thirds down from 8 tons in 2011. Even the area under cultivation has dropped nearly 58% since the turn of the century to 2,390 hectares in 2019. For context, it takes. 150 crocus flowers to produce a single gram of saffron. Broader picture, while a regular spice like cumin gives a yield of 600 kilos per acre, saffron yields a meager 1.8 kgs. We used to get a few kilograms of saffron from our 14-acre field.

This season, we barely got 150 grams, said Ali Mohamed Rishi, a 60-year-old farmer from the town of Kruh, not far from Pamport. The heat, dust from cement factories and poor irrigation destroyed everything. Climate change has undoubtedly ravaged Kashmir's saffron fields with rising temperatures and uneven rainfall. But that is just one piece of the puzzle. The bigger failures lie in India's inability to build a sustainable economy around Kashmir's red gold the way it did with, say, tea or cardamom. And here's the truth. Saffron is one of the most exceptional economy. expensive spices in the world and its price is only increasing.

Kashmiri saffron costs about €1,500 per 10 grams today, compared to $800 a decade ago. But none of these gains have passed on to the farmers who cultivate it, and therein lies the mystery. For most agricultural crops, much of the value addition happens outside the fields, during packaging, branding and retailing. And that is precisely where saffron is losing out. Safran farmers individually sell to traders in small quantities, often without knowing the real price, said Bashir Ahmed Ali, professor at Sharia Kashmir University of Agricultural Science and Technology. They lack collective marketing systems. Branding and aggregation are also weak and there is almost no direct connection to big companies who are actually selling the saffron. The value chain is indeed broken. In 2020, the Indian government gave Kashmiri Safran the geographical indication or GI Tag,

which certifies that it comes from a particular region and attests to its high quality. This was supposed to help farmers realise higher prices and boost the country's saffron exports. In reality, Kashmiri saffron continues to suffer from rampant adulteration and is often undercut by cheap imports from Iran. Many traders mix Kashmiri saffron with Iranian strands or worse, fake saffron made from dyed corn husk or horsehair, said Javeh Dhamad, a saffron trader in Shrinagar. This kills the trust of buyers. Without certification and quality enforcement, we are ruining our own market. Iran controls around 90% of the global saffron market, courtesy of strong price boards, centralized marketing and government incentives.

Ultimately, it seems unreasonable to expect global consumers to trust Kashmiri saffron when Indian brands themselves do not. Kashmiri saffron is not available consistently. So much of our demand is met through Iranian imports, said a sourcing executive at Food Company Everest Spices. Even then, demand is limited. Trading volumes are quite low and its use case is limited to select premium products or festive packs, added the executive.

A pack of Everest saffron made up of 0.5 grams costs 200 rupees. A procurement manager at Rosianum, a direct-to-consumer brand that sells wellness products, concurred that saffron has high margins, but it is not something every household buys. For younger consumers, it is not a part of regular cooking at all. We sell it more as a part of nutraceuticals than as a daily spice, he said. Even the National Saffron mission launched by the Indian government in 2010 with much fanfare has shriveled to just another broken promise. With a total outlay of over 400 crore rupees, the mission aimed to bolster saffron production

in Kashmir with the help of better irrigation, modern labs and branding support. Instead, it was plagued with complaints of large-scale corruption and its impact on the ground remained limited. According to Parliament data, only 85 of the 128 planned bore wells meant for irrigation were created till the end of the mission in 2018 and even those suffered from poor maintenance. The sprinkler systems reached just 2,100 hectares far short of the total cultivated area of 3,700 hectares. This borewell worked only for one season. We called the authorities many times, but they never fixed it. said Muhammad Arfad Ghani, 27 years old, standing beside his dried-up borewell, barely visible under the weeds.

At the end of the day, the mission lacked dedicated follow-up. They brought machines but no one trained the farmers. This season's poor harvest is proof that we focused on tools and not the systems, said Irfan Hashim, a senior researcher at Researcher's Bridge. Throughout history, saffron has been sought as a source of luxury, even opulence. In Greek mythology, the king of God, Zeus, sometimes slept on a bed of saffron. Closer home, the Star Cross lovers, the king of Kashmir in the 16th century, Yusuf Shah and poet Asuni first met in a blossoming saffron field on a moonlit night.

But the environment is fast-turning hostile to Kashmiri saffron. Rising temperatures, coupled with pollution from the growing cement industry in the valley, has threatened the region's already precarious saffron economy. Falling yields aside, it affects the quality of the little saffron that does grow, whose taste depends on a precise triad of rainfall, temperature and soil. In light of this, a small group of scientists and farmers are experimenting with an alternative. Indoor saffron farming using LED lights and vertical grow trace. And the results have been promising.

With no dust, no heat and no porcupines, the flowers are very healthy. If we scale this, saffron farming can be revived, especially in areas where climate change has hit the hardest, said researcher Bridges Hashim, who helped implement this experiment. Javed Ahmed, the trader from Srinagar, was one of the participants in the experiment. Indoor saffron gave me a better yield per bulb. The flowers were also richer in colour and smell, he said. Though this cost him more than his regular method, he sees it as an investment.

While outdoor cultivation costs around 50,000 rupees per 100 square feet, indoor saffron farming has to account for polyhouses, climate control and more. And it goes up to 1,000 rupees. What choice do I have? This may be the only way forward. There has been some progress on the marketing front as well. The India International Kashmir Saffir Trading Centre, set up by the government in Pampore in 2018 and now run by Kashmir's Agriculture Department, has finally introduced technology to this ancient spice. It helps farmers with automated drying, grading and e- auctions.

The best thing to come out of this, Kashmiri farmers now get direct market access for their saffron. This season, we handled more than 500 kilos of saffron and most of it was graded category 1. said the center's technical officer who did not want to be named as he was not authorized to speak to the media. Farmers who sold here earned 1,400 to 1,600 per 10 grams. No middleman involved. The global saffin market is projected to reach $960 million by 2030 given by demand in nutraceuticals and skincare products, according to a market research firm. If Kashmir captures even 10% of this market, it could become an over 800 crore industry from 500 crores currently.

But this calls for radical reinvention. We need to stop thinking of saffarin as just a cooking spice. Globally, saffron is used in wellness products. Tea, oil, supplements, cosmetics, said SQASTs, Ahmed Ali. If we want to create a daubal-like brand from Kashmir, we will need investment, formal cooperatives and strict quality controls. Back in Pampur, Ahmad Yusuf kneels beside a lonely crocus flower at sunset.

Its red strands glowing in the fading light. This flower survived and that gives me home, he said. But if Kashmir's red gold is to preserve its slushar, it needs to be cultivated not with sentiment but with strategy. The untapped 800-crow-rupy market beckons. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a lot of.

a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted by Sniktha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Seam.