World | India
Kashmir fruit traders to suspend business across Line of Control
Fruit growers and traders in the Kashmir Valley have decided not to send their consignments across the Line of Control (LoC) due to lack of communication, banking arrangements and contact with traders across the border.
- IANS
- Published: 00:11 November 11, 2008
- Saja Begum, mother of a missing youth, Firdous Ahmad, weeps during a demonstration organised by the APDP in Srinagar.
- Image Credit: AP
Srinagar: Fruit growers and traders in the Kashmir Valley have decided not to send their consignments across the Line of Control (LoC) due to lack of communication, banking arrangements and contact with traders across the border.
"We have no knowledge about what happened to the 7,000 boxes of fruit we have already sent to Muzaffarabad since the LoC trade began October 21," Farooq Ahmad Malek, president of the Valley's fruit buyers' association, said yesterday. The LoC divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
"The fruit consignments amount to Rs3.5 million (Dh270,000) and we don't even know whether these have been sold at all or not," Malek said.
The traders have decided not to resume the cross-LoC trade unless the government here allows a delegation of fruit traders to visit Muzaffarabad and work out modalities with their counterparts there.
Telephones needed
The traders and growers also demanded the government allow telephone facilities between the Valley and Pakistan administered Kashmir.
"At the moment, we only have access to traders in Muzaffarabad through the Internet, but this facility is not available to everyone," he said.
"Trade without a telephone link is unimaginable anywhere in the world today," said Malek.
Telephone links between the two sides have been jammed by authorities here to obstruct communication channels of separatist guerrillas across the LoC.
Bridging a six-decade divide, India and Pakistan resumed trade across the LoC October 21 with trucks loaded with goods like spices, apples, walnuts and carpets rolling across the de-facto border from both sides.
The cross-LoC trade on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad and Poonch-Rawlakote routes began for the first time since 1948, when commercial ties snapped following the India-Pakistan war a year after the bloody partition of the subcontinent.
Indian forces kill nine
Indian troops killed nine separatist guerrillas in gunbattles across Kashmir, police said on Monday, a week before local elections in the disputed region that are being boycotted by the rebels.
"Security forces have fought pitched battles with militants at several places during the past two days," a police spokesman said.
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