India, Dec. 20 -- On a cold morning in Srinagar's Natipora neighbourhood, 52-year-old Ghulam Nabi Wani pulls up the shutter of a two-storey building he bought more than 20 years ago.

A pharmacy opens on the ground floor. Upstairs, students file into a private coaching center.

Wani does not call himself an investor. When he bought the plot in the late 1990s, he was running a small timber business and paid less than 6 lakh for land that many locals thought was too far from the city to matter.

Today, real estate brokers estimate the property's value at more than 3crore.

"I didn't buy it to make money," Wani said. "I bought it because I didn't know where else to put my savings."

That decision, shaped more by constraint than strategy, ref...