Two Tonnes a Day Since 1925: Why Every Car to Patnitop Stops at Kud

Ninety minutes out of Jammu on NH-44, somewhere past Udhampur and just before the road starts climbing in earnest, the traffic thins and then abruptly does not. Cars pull in on both shoulders. People get out, stretch, and walk into a shop to buy sweets they will eat in the car within the hour.

This is Kud, and it is the reason nobody arrives at Patnitop hungry.

The town sits at 1,855 metres, 100 kilometres from Jammu, 38 past Udhampur and 10 short of Patnitop. Its 2011 population was 1,565. Almost everything it is known for is one sweet: desi ghee patisa, the flaky, ghee-heavy slab that people elsewhere in India call soan papdi and that Kud makes denser, richer and in quantities out of all proportion to its size.

The anchor is Prem Di Hatti, opened in 1925 by Prem Lok Nath Khajuria. A century on, it runs three outlets along the Srinagar-Jammu highway and turns out around two tonnes of sweets a day. Alongside the patisa there is kalakand barfi, mango jelly, and — for anyone who has been in a car since six in the morning — chana-poori, samosa and dal.

Two tonnes a day, in a town of fifteen hundred people, tells you the customer was never local. Kud is a highway economy. It exists in the shape it does because of where it sits on the road to Srinagar, which is also why it is more precarious than it looks.

When NH-44 was four-laned, the alignment moved. Shops that had spent decades building a position on a particular bend suddenly found the traffic somewhere else. Prem Di Hatti's answer was to reposition along the new road rather than wait for the road to come back — which is how a 1925 business survives a highway being rebuilt around it. Not everyone on that strip managed the same thing.

There is a less comfortable chapter too, and it is on the record. In July 2024, allegations about ingredients circulated on social media. Local police investigated and the shop was cleared. It is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as rumour, because the rumour outlived the finding.

If you are stopping

Kud is a natural break on the way up and a better one on the way down, when you are not trying to make Patnitop before the light goes. The stop is ten minutes and the road immediately afterwards is the switchback stretch, so eat before rather than during.

Patisa is the standard thing to carry back to Jammu — it travels well, it does not need refrigeration, and it is the gift that requires no explanation. We could not verify a current counter price from a primary source, so ask at the shop rather than trusting a figure from an online reseller; prices on the highway strip vary by shop and by season.

What makes the stop worth making is not novelty. It is that a one-street town has spent a hundred years getting very good at exactly one thing, and you are driving straight through it anyway.

Sources: Greater Kashmir · Kud, Udhampur district