By Shazia Bhat

I first met the coin kids at the Sonwar crossing. One carried a glue-stick, another a crumpled report card. They said,“Auntie, craft project, thirty-two rupees short.”

The light turned green, I drove off, and the sentence stayed longer than the dust.

Two weeks later, I saw the same boy, with same glue-stick and project. Only the craft had changed: now it was origami.

I rolled down and asked why he was not in class. He grinned, said school ends at two, then sprinted to the next car.

The valley that once sang self-respect now hums a parallel tune: pity on sale, coins for applause.

Drive the nine kilometres from Lal Chowk to the airport and you meet the whole catalogue. Women holding glucose bottles like newborn babes, grandfathers with matching X-ray sheets, girls who recite the first surah in bell-clear Arabic, and boys selling ballpoints no one needs.

The pens cost twenty rupees. The going rate for a window knock is ten. Do the math and you see the pens are only alibis.

Last summer, some volunteers stood outside Kashmir University at dawn. By dusk, they had logged“a little over a thousand” beggars, double the count of the year before.

More than half carried Aadhaar cards with addresses in the apple heartland of the valley.

When the team offered free ride home, only two hundred climbed the bus. The rest melted into the crowd, like snow on a stove.

The story sharpens at the women's shelter in Srinagar.

A staff member who did not want her name printed keeps a notebook of“frequent guests.” She showed me pages where the same names appear every harvest season, when orchards need cheap labour, and again in winter, when the valley slows down.

“They pay rent in Rangreth,” she said, tapping a column.“They commute to work, work that is begging.”

The shelter once offered sewing machines so women could stitch pherans. Half sold the machines for twelve hundred rupees and returned to the crossings.

Islam carries a simple rule: if you can stand, you earn. The Prophet's warning about fleshless faces on Judgment Day is taught in every madrasa. But the valley that sends thousands to memorize the Quran somehow edits out the next line: the upper hand is better than the lower.

We still drop coins, because charity earns stars in the next world, and nobody wants to argue at a traffic light.

The numbers we do have are small but telling. A volunteer group surveyed fifty cars at the Regal Chowk signal for one week. Drivers handed out roughly two thousand rupees a day.

Stretch that to the city's thirty main crossings and you get sixty thousand rupees every twenty-four hours: twenty-two million a year, all in loose change.

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