Nadroo—lotus stems or upper root—figuring most prominent in Kashmiri cuisines kept the date with all the big festivals ranging from Eid to Navroz. But since the great floods of 2014, it has disappeared from the markets.
Ahead of this Navroz, the local Nadroo was again off-the-shelf in Srinagar markets for the second consecutive year after 2014 floods.
Nadroo—lotus stems or upper root—figuring most prominent in Kashmiri cuisines kept the date with all the big festivals ranging from Eid to Navroz. But since the great floods of 2014, it has disappeared from the markets.
The floodwaters, according to growers in Dal lake, not just washed away the Nadru crop in 2014, but also dwindled chances of its growth at least for some more years.
“We have nothing to sell or grow. The land we used to grow our vegetables on was submerged by the murky waters of 2014 rendering it unhealthy for vegetable cultivation,” said Muhammad Amin Latoo, a Nadroo grower in Dal interiors.
“At present one can’t find a trace of any Nadroo cultivation,” he said.
“We had hoped this year we would get some Nadroo produce but not a single Nadroo could be found in Dal right now,” a group of Nadroo growers said.
Nadroo grows inside the water and its leaf remains the main factor to make the produce ripe.
There is a misconception among many people that how Nadroo would get spoiled due to floods when it actually grows inside the water here lay the answer for their query. “The leaf of Nadroo spreads at around two to three feet which feeds the Nadroo. And due to the floods the leaf remained submerged in the water, got rotten resulting into the damage of the stem and the roots of Nadru,” Muhammad Abdullah Natoo, a grower at Mir Behri in the interior Dal explained.
“We would have been busy on these days. But now we have nothing to do as Nadroo crop was damaged in the 2014 deluge,” Natoo said.
However, the local market is flooded with Nadroo from outside states.
“People ask for Dal Nadroo, but that is not avilable,” Ghulam Muhammad, a vegetable hawker at a pavement in Batamaloo, said.
Natoo, 55, who had got on lease several Kanals in Dal near Hazratbal shrine from Wakf to cultivate Nadroos could not cultivate a single bundle of the crop.
“On an average I used to sell the Nadroo of more than one lakh rupees, but this time around I could do nothing,” Natoo said.
