Scribbling a success

Inside Ookhu, the pencil village of India

- TARIQ BHAT

Nestled along the meandering banks of the Jhelum River is the village of Ookhu at Kakpora in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district, 26km from Srinagar. Ookhu has earned itself the title of ‘pencil village of India’, and rightly so. It has beaten competition from China and Germany to become a major supplier of raw materials to leading pencil manufacturers in India.

Manzoor Ahmad Allaie lives in one of the 250 quaint homes that comprise the village. He was born into the timber trade. As a young boy, he watched his father—a small-time timber trader—toil hard to provide for his wife, two sons and a daughter. After he finished schooling in 1996, Allaie persuaded his father to sell some land to buy a bandsaw mill and set up Jhelum Agro Industries. He began by making poplar boxes to transport Kashmir’s famed bloodred apples.

The mill improved the family’s finances, but Allaie had bigger dreams. In 2012, he travelled to Jammu and convinced Hindustan Pencils, India’s top pencil maker, that Jhelum Agro Industries could meet their raw material needs. It first supplied poplar logs and then shifted to slats—5.2mm thick wooden blocks that could be used to make four pencils. That was a decisive move, as demand for slats soared. Allaie hired 15 people, secured a bank loan to buy a machine to make slats and a generator to power the machine during power cuts. “Making a slat is half the job done,” explains Allaie. “We succeeded in that and the business took off.” His success inspired his neighbour Feroz Ahmed, owner of Barkat Saw Mills, to follow suit and provide raw materials to pencil manufacturers outside Kashmir.