The Enorkos Gazette
Column — on the record
Why I built a registry, not another network
Kashmir does not lack founders. It lacks a way to tell them apart from the noise — so I stopped complaining and built the instrument.
Dr Fayaz Ganie
FOUNDER, ENORKOS · VETERINARIAN TURNED ENTREPRENEUR · FOUNDER OF TRUEVET AND HELPRUSH · FORMERLY CARGILL · SWORN ON THE REGISTRY →
I have been a vocal critic of what we call our startup ecosystem. I wrote in the Kashmir Observer this June that the system was not designed for people building real things — it was designed to look like it was. But criticism is cheap. So let me put my name where my mouth has been.
For a decade I have watched the same ceremony repeat itself in the valley: a scheme is announced, a directory swells, a headline counts us in the thousands. Then an investor flies in, opens the list, and finds bakeries, boutiques and construction firms wearing the word startup like a borrowed coat. He closes the list and does not come back. The real founders — and I promise you they exist, I have met them in Pampore and Sopore and Baramulla — pay the price for noise they did not make.
When we finally ran the numbers against the government's own corporate registry, the ceremony collapsed into arithmetic. Of 1,105 entries on the UT's official startup roster, 886 exist and are active. Of those, 416 meet the government's own definition of a startup. Of those, eight — eight — can publicly prove revenue, intellectual property, or capital raised. That is not a verdict against Kashmir. It is a verdict against counting claims instead of checking them.
I am a veterinarian who ended up an exporter. When Truevet sends a phytogenic formulation abroad, no buyer takes my word for anything: the certificate of analysis speaks, or nothing ships. It took me embarrassingly long to ask why we demand more proof for a feed additive than for a founder. LinkedIn will verify your face. Nobody, anywhere, verifies your claim.
ENORKOS is my answer, and it is deliberately unglamorous: a registry. Founders sworn against the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Investors verified by the founders whose cap tables hold their money. Mentors attested by the people they actually advised. No feed, no followers, no theatre — you state what you need, and the registry routes it to verified counterparties who may accept or decline. Every claim carries its source, every classification its methodology, every correction its record.
To my fellow founders of the valley: the census is public, the disputes desk is open, and the oath is free. If your company is real, fifteen minutes puts it beyond argument. And to those who padded the rolls — the arithmetic is published now. The coat no longer fits.
Gazette columns are signed by sworn members of the registry; notices are the registry’s own. Citations welcome — the record is the point.