New Delhi, June 21 -- Srinagar: Shahid Kamili still remembers the silence. On the morning of 5 August 2019, his steel plant in Srinagar's Rangreth industrial estate stood eerily still. The hot strip mills sat idle, the reheating furnace cold. Nearly 350 of his 500 workers, mostly migrant labourers, had vanished overnight.

Just a day earlier, on 4 August, authorities had issued an urgent directive asking all non-local workers to leave the Kashmir Valley, ahead of the central government's move to revoke Article 370, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its special constitutional status.

By dawn, Kamili's Himalayan Rolling Steel Industries Pvt. Ltd, a Rs.120-crore industrial unit, had come to a grinding halt.

"When 350 migrant workers left my s...