Disaster Everywhere

An editorial in the Kashmir Observer repeats the obvious

Disaster In Dal

For the past many decades a tragedy of monumental proportions has been unfolding before the very eyes of Srinagar dwellers with every passing day. Quart by quart, the once pristine waters of the Dal Lake have been vitiated to unpardonable levels, and the lake itself has shrunk to a bare 11 square kilometers from its once majestic expanse, as human settlements, “reclaimed” land, and habitations of all forms ate into what should have been an inviolate realm. As the jewel of Srinagar is suffocated to death, hundreds of crores of rupees are being claimed to have been spent to save it, an expenditure - undertaken after constant goading - that seems to have gone totally down the drain.

Successive state governments since partition have been criminally remiss in ignoring the potent threat the growing “colonization” of the lake and its environs posed to its survival, and the policies the governments have pursued ever since the Dal’s sickness became starkly and unavoidably evident in the early eighties are both obtuse and opaque. Down the decades, the lake and its environs have been milked for all they are worth, both in terms of the so-called exploitation of their tourist potential, and using them as largess to dispense favours to politically sympathetic quarters. Traditional lake dwellers have been left to their deleterious devices without any let or hindrance as they represented a solid vote bank for the National Conference that did not impose any preventive restrictions on their activities in a bid to keep them in good humour. Further, the party, along with other political forces, has cultivated the valley’s money bags by permitting the construction of a number of hotels and shopping complexes on land girdling the lake that had wisely been kept out of bounds even by autocratic rulers.

The stretch from Dalgate to the Nehru Park along the Boulevard, chock-a-block with constructions inimical to the health of the lake, represents the politically-motivated profaning of the lake’s surroundings. True, the catchment area of the Dal beyond Nishat, Shalimar and Harwan, and stretching into the Zabarwan hills, was populated by villages, but a crassly mercenary political dispensation has transformed the rural character of the critical zones into a semi-urban slum by allowing the rich and the powerful to build luxurious retreats and residences, setting the tone for widespread defiling of the lake’s regenerative lungs. A scrupulously regulated and managed rural setting could have found answers to the inevitable fallout of human habitation – solid and liquid waste – in these areas, but mindless colonization has overtaken any remedial measures as the toxic effluents from the mushrooming settlements find their way directly into the Dal.

The fringes of the lake have become a squalid sight with countless inhabited constructions contributing to the pollution and decay of its waters. Lands offering a breathtaking view of the Dal, particularly in the vicinity of the Cheshma Shahi and the newly developed Royal Springs Golf Course, have been turned into prized real estate for the custodians of Kashmir’s heritage, its powerful politicians and bureaucrats, to live in secluded splendour. Such developments in the zone crucial for the lake’s survival have sounded its death knell, and no government appears to have the political will to reverse the decades of abuse.

The much-touted Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA), instituted to give the Dal a new lease of life, has morphed into a money-guzzling corpus that moves only when the High Court cracks the whip. Instead of any real achievements to its credit, it has been in the news for fraud, irregularities and favouritism. Even its present drive to bring violating houseboat owners to book has come at the goading of the High Court. Left to itself, it has been able to achieve nothing except half-hearted experiments at various methods to rid the lake of unwanted weeds. Even this unproductive exercise has been chiefly motivated by pecuniary gains to be made out of ordering machinery of various sorts, equipment that eventually gathers rust out of unsuitability or misuse. For the long years it has been in existence, LAWDA has been unable to come up with any worthwhile ideas to prevent houseboat sewage from finding its way to the water, and today, with the High Court breathing down its neck, it begins to flex muscle by ordering non-complying houseboats to shut down.

The lakes plight has also engendered a host of NGOs that solicit massive funds ostensibly to work for the survival of the Dal, but what happens to the finances is as murky an affair as the waters of the dying lake.

So brazen is the financial exploitation of the Dal’s condition, that the LAWDA does not even bother about questions raised about its use of funds. The least it could have done all these years with the moneys in its kitty was to subsidize sewage collection and treatment facilities for the houseboats that have been facing a resource crunch over the past two decades. But, obviously, official loyalties lie in affairs transcending the fate of the Dal.

For all the breast-beating in the government, the failure to evacuate the thousands of troopers stationed in hotels in its periphery, another big source of pollution, is a real sign of its capabilities.