Twice a year, in the restive northernmost state of India, Jammu and Kashmir's capital picks up and moves 300 kilometres. In October, the move is from the cold of Srinagar to the more hospitable winters of Jammu.

Over the past few weeks, parliamentarians, senior government officials and public servants have been carefully packing computers, furniture and India's seemingly inexhaustible supply of string-bound files in preparation for the move.

A convoy of trucks has spent the last week being loaded at the Civil Secretariat offices in Srinagar. They will deliver all the accoutrements of government - along with the household possessions of those who serve it - to their new, albeit temporary, homes.

All up, nearly 10,000 people will move south for the winter, before doing it all again in reverse in April or May next year as Jammu grows too hot.

The move causes massive disruption - government offices are shut down for 10 days either side of the move, and the state's major highway is blocked off and made one-way for the event. It is also hugely expensive, costing one of India's poorest states an estimated 260 million rupees ($A4.95 million) each way.

But thus it has always been in Jammu and Kashmir. In 1872, the Maharajah of Kashmir ordered the first move. Ostensibly it is about weather, but there are politics at play too. Hindu-majority Jammu and Muslim-majority Kashmir make equal claims to the capital, and cries of regional discrimination emerge each time abandonment of one or the other is even suggested.

In the days of airconditioning and central heating, of email and reliable phones, weather considerations are not the priorities they once were. But in large part, the Darbar Move is because it always has been.

''This is how it is done in J&K. People understand the problems, but we … we cannot discriminate against one place or another by abandoning it,'' one government employee told The Saturday Age on condition of anonymity.

As long ago as 1987, government reports found the move was deeply flawed, but they inspired little action towards abandoning it. ''This is a luxury which a poor state like J&K can ill afford,'' one report said.

But there is form too, albeit historical, for this kind of perennial human migration in India. In the days of the British Raj, governors and viceroys driven to distraction by Calcutta or Delhi's unrelenting heat sought solace in the Himalayan foothills.

The British made Shimla their official summer capital in 1864, embracing a Darbar Move of such indulgence that Kashmir's endeavour looks positively austere.

In her 2007 history of the Raj's demise, Indian Summer, Alex von Tunzelmann writes that the British would sometimes move to the mountains for eight months of the year, ''with the European ladies and gentlemen carried up in the local jhampan sedan chairs''.

''They were followed by hundreds of coolies … lugging dispatch boxes, carefully packed crockery, musical instruments, trunks full of theatrical costumes for amateur dramatics … and tons upon tons of files; all the paraphernalia of the Raj literally borne on the shoulders of one long caravan of miserable, sweating, Indian peasants.''