The Poverty of Economic Thought in Kashmir |
Kashmir has produced generations of professionals: doctors who now run hospitals across the country, engineers who have built exceptional architecture, civil servants who occupy some of the most consequential offices in the administration. What it has not produced, in any meaningful number, is economists. This is not a complaint about missing celebrities. It is a statement about the absence of a discipline, an entire way of thinking about scarcity, policy and human behaviour, from the intellectual life of a region that has spent three decades arguing, almost entirely without data, about its own economic condition.
The scale of the gap becomes clearer against the region’s own institutional record. The University of Kashmir’s own doctoral award lists show that in some recent years, the entire university, across every subject combined, produced very few PhDs in economics annually. This number is dwarfed by subjects such as history or sociology. This says how little institutional weight economics has carried here, even within its own flagship university. A place that debates unemployment, horticulture distress, tourism collapse and fiscal dependence almost daily has trained almost no one to study any of it with rigour.
Among the handful of names that do exist, one sits well above the rest. Dr Haseeb Drabu is, without any competition, the closest thing this region has produced to a public economist in the........