There’s a 90 percent chance that the pencil you’re writing with is made of slats processed in Wakhoo of south Kashmir – for it supplies more than 70% of wood to India’s pencil industry.
There’s no authoritative siren signalling workers to factories dotting the picturesque village of Wakhoo in Pulwama district of south Kashmir. It’s just the bright morning warming the land that is cue for hundreds of villagers to file out of their homes and go to work.
Surrounded by rich paddy fields, orchards bearing the sweetest apples and tall poplar trees, the quaint Kashmiri village suddenly becomes the hub of a great industrial activity.
To get to the nub of it, Wakhoo, or Oukhoo as it is sometimes spelt, is Pencilwala Gaon (pencil village), fittingly called so because of its 17 factories that make thin slats of poplar wood, which are then bundled, packed and shipped to pencil-makers across India.
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Once a sleepy village of timber traders, Wakhoo now supplies more than 70% of the processed wood to the pencil industry in the country.
Its factories employ around 4,000 employees and, according to figures released by the Union home ministry, Wakhoo earned Rs 107 crore in 2020, the pandemic year that saw extended lockdowns. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledged the village in his Mann Ki Baat radio address, hailing it as an example of self-sufficiency.
At the centre of this industry is the soft, tensile wood from poplar trees that grow along streams and wetlands of Kashmir Valley.
Deodar wood was used before until this majestic tree was almost cut to the brink of extirpation and strict laws were enforced to protect the species. By the 1990s, poplar replaced deodar and soon gained in popularity.
Trees are grown, harvested, milled, and cut down to five-millimetre thick slats, which when stacked together in a circular pattern like Lego blocks, look like huge baskets basking in the sun.
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These slats go through strict quality checks. Rough edges and knots are removed. These are then sundried, bundled into bunches of 800 to 900 pieces, packed in nylon bags and shipped to pencil manufacturers, said Feroz Ahmad, head of Barkat Agro Industries in the village.
For Manzoor Ahmad Allaie, owner of Allaie Agro Industries, the largest pencil wood producing company in the country, it all began in 2010 when he at 42 was a small-time log trader looking desperately for a job. He visited Jammu and landed in a pencil unit in Bari Brahmana.
A sudden epiphany dawned on him: the poplar logs scattered across his village could be the perfect wood for the pencil industry.
And that was it.
Earlier the pencil makers in India used to import most of the wood while some quantity was supplied from the parts of Kerala. Not any more.
“Our main buyer is Hindustan pencils, the maker of Natraj,” said Manzoor, 54, president of the pencil manufacturers’ union in Kashmir. “We’re getting orders lately from multinational companies as well.”
Wakhoo’s good fortunes are rubbing off on neighbouring villages like Samboora, which send an army of workers to the poplar units.
One such worker is 22-year-old Shahida Akhtar. Until six months ago, she was jobless. She scored one in a Wakhoo factory and she now juggles household chores, ailing parents and pencil work perfectly. She even works overtime for the extra money.
There are migrant workers as well.
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“I’ve been working here for the past five years,” said Om Prakash from West Bengal. “These units were closed only during the pandemic lockdowns.”
Like all trades, the pandemic battered the pencil-makers too.
“Our payments got stalled and orders almost dried up during the first six months of the pandemic. But praise the Lord, we are back on track now,” Manzoor said.
According to Haji Muzzafar Ahmad, president of the Industrial Growth Centre at Lassipora in Pulwama, the producers in the Valley are supplying processed slats to make 25 lakh pencils every day.
But the demand is much higher, now that millions of students are back in school, attending classes in person.
The old-timers in Wakhoo hold the pencil with pride, with reverence and often with a smile because there was a time they remember when it was a luxury.
It is hard to believe it was once tough to get a pencil for the children in their hamlet, now designated the country’s “Village of Pencils.”
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The lead image at the top shows cut size logs of Poplar piled in patterns to be processed into pencil slates (Photo by Nasir Yousufi)
Nasir Yousufi is a journalist based in Srinagar.
