'Orphans' of Kashmir whose mothers can't afford to keep them

Altav Khan, a slight 13-year-old with sorrowful, hazel eyes, cannot remember his father. But he knows all about his death; how the young militant from the Hizbul Mujahedeen separatist group was shot by soldiers when Altav was two.

Today, the boy lives at an orphanage in Srinagar, Kashmir's main city, with 350 other children aged six to 18, more than half of whom are victims of Kashmir's 20-year insurrection against India.

Up to 100,000 children in this state of 5.5 million people are thought to be 'orphans' - a term that in Kashmir tends to refer to children who have lost their fathers, and whose mothers are too poor to look after them. Altav has neither parent, he confides in a whisper that is barely audible; his mother died 'of natural causes' shortly after she watched soldiers enter her home and shoot dead her husband.

Before 1989, when separatists began their uprising against India, Kashmir had few orphanages. Srinagar had just one, with fewer than 20 children. Today there are half a dozen large institutions in the city - and a number more scattered throughout the Kashmir Valley.

'This was never part of our culture before all the violence,' says Saifullah Khalid, principal of the Muslim Welfare Society-run orphanage where Altav lives, gesturing at the building's cold, bare floors and walls.

'Before, people would never have taken their brother's children to a strange place and left them. They would have adopted them. But with the huge numbers of deaths, this became impossible,' Dr Khalid says.