GOWHAR GEELANI: My first question is for Peerzada Mahboob ul Haq. You have reviewed this CAG [Comptroller and Auditor General] report, which has been very disturbing. Beyond the well-known factors of human greed, pollution, encroachment, and urbanisation, what are the scientific reasons behind Jammu and Kashmir losing its water bodies at such a pace?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: The CAG report did not particularly surprise me. There have already been national and international reports warning that nearly half of the world’s important lakes are shrinking. This is not a phenomenon unique to Jammu and Kashmir. However, the fragile geology and topography of this region make it especially alarming here.

It is worth clarifying what kind of report this is. It is a performative audit or an environmental audit that assesses whether the conservation schemes put in place by the government have delivered results over time. It is not a scientific report per se; it must be read from a financial and performance perspective.

To understand the deeper issue, we need to appreciate the geology of Jammu and Kashmir. We live in the Himalayas—a range of young fold mountains stretching from Pakistan to Tibet and Bhutan. This is a young fold mountain which is still growing, unlike the ancient landmasses of peninsular India. The height of Mount Everest, for instance, increases by about a centimetre each year. Because these mountains are still in the process of building, any alteration would have greater consequences than it would in an old landmass.

The lakes of Jammu and Kashmir are fed by glaciers, making it an integrated process. For example, Jammu and Kashmir is a major tourist destination. Take Pahalgam: as tourist footfall increases, so does the carbon footprint. This generates soot and particulate matter. When this soot is carried by wind and settles on glaciers, it changes their surface from bright white to a darker shade. Snow and ice have a high albedo—they reflect sunlight. But once soot covers them, they begin to absorb heat rather than reflect it, accelerating melting. This melting destabilises moraines and glacial dams, leading to glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs)—events we have witnessed in Sikkim, Uttarakhand, and more recently in Kishtwar.

None of these events is purely natural. There is a clear human dimension to each of them. And once the glaciers melt, and floods pour down, rivers and lakes—the Jhelum, Dal, Wular—bear the consequences. Their surface areas have all shrunken measurably over time.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Muslim Jan, you have closely tracked what is being published in local newspapers and digital media. In your assessment, how is the environment being covered by Kashmir’s media? Is adequate attention being given to this issue? Is the environmental reportage episodic and event-driven, and not consistent and disciplined?

MUSLIM JAN: This is very concerning to me, as environmental issues are, alongside gender issues, something I care about enormously, because we are all part of this ecosystem.

The state of environmental reporting in local print media is quite sad. There are no dedicated environment pages in our newspapers. There are advertisements, yes, but no reporters assigned specialised beats covering lakes, conservation of forests, biodiversity, etc. A minor theft becomes breaking news, while the slow destruction of our ecosystem goes largely unnoticed. Even on social media, where there is no shortage of vloggers, content tends to be trivial. Environmental journalism requires not just occasional reports, but daily, dedicated coverage. The environment affects the air we breathe, the water we drink, our health, etc. It requires a specialised beat and sustained engagement. Some individual journalists have done exceptional work, but the burden cannot rest on two or three individuals. Newspapers should carry a full page per day, even on slow news days.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Furkan Jan, you represent the younger generation. When you speak with your friends and peers at university, does the environment come up in conversation? Does the environment dominate the conversations, or is it a one-off thing?

FURKAN JAN: I would say this is the most paramount issue of our generation. For those who came before us, climate change and environmental degradation were future problems. For us, they are present realities. We are living through it right now.

We are aware—we grew up with environmental messaging in school assemblies. But we lack action. My generation is not being placed at the forefront of decision-making. This CAG report is a bombshell, yet the response has been a fragmented discussion with no concrete steps. Responsibilities are divided across departments with no concrete steps being taken. You expect us to be aware of the problem, but what next? Do you expect us to work on it since your generation has clearly failed?

GOWHAR GEELANI: Peerzada Mahboob, these lakes also sustain aquatic biodiversity and provide livelihoods—the Dal Lake, Wular, or Anchar, which has water chestnuts, lotus stem and fish. How do we strike a balance between protecting these livelihoods and conserving biodiversity? And could you elaborate on the earlier point regarding the “carrying capacity” of water bodies?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: Lakes and wetlands have their own independent ecosystems. A lake has a catchment area—a surrounding zone from which it receives water, typically filtered through forest cover. When deforestation occurs, that protective layer disappears. Rain and runoff carry soil, silt, and sediment directly into the lake instead of being absorbed by roots and vegetation. This is where soil erosion becomes a direct threat to lake health.

When silt accumulates in a lake, it reduces the depth of the photic zone—the layer of water that sunlight can penetrate. As light penetration decreases, conditions favour the rapid growth of algae and aquatic weeds. This process is called eutrophication. While it may look green and lush on the surface, it is ecologically destructive. Eutrophication raises both Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD). In simple terms, the organisms in the lake ecosystem begin to suffocate—just as we would in a depleted atmosphere.

This process is technically called the “ageing” of a lake—a natural phenomenon that occurs over thousands of years. But human activity is accelerating it to the point where our lakes may die long before their natural lifespan.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Let us focus specifically on Dal Lake. Khurshid Naqib—who formerly headed the Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (now the LCMA)—has written that Dal Lake once extended across 24 square kilometres; it has now shrunk to almost 11 square kilometres. There are floating gardens and houseboats for tourists, which are attractive to the eye, but are they good for the lake?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: It’s absolutely not. I’ll tell you something: apart from the shrinking of lakes, it’s important to understand what happens when you have the Dal and then, alongside it, a lively houseboat and tourism industry operating at a scale that is unsustainable for the Dal lake. What happens then? There is an increase in waste.

For example, there are no functioning treatment plants. I would say they are dysfunctional across India. If they were not dysfunctional, we would not have the Ghazipur landfill in Delhi. So what happens is that this waste gets into the Dal ecosystem.

You also have encroachments because, when the shrinking happens, and the water recedes, somebody comes and grabs the land. So, when you look at it from a political angle, this is a kind of populist measure that all political parties feel reluctant to act on because they think it might harm their political interests or processes. When we say that the personal is political, I’ll say the environment is also political, more political than the personal thing.

So it’s very important to understand that striking a balance between livelihoods and conserving the lakes is crucial. For example, the people who are fishing or extracting lotus stems, water chestnuts, and so on from the lake do it through a manual process. There is no heavy machinery involved. So, basically, they are part and parcel of the ecosystem. In a way, they’re helping to maintain the BOD and COD levels. When they remove water chestnuts, for instance, it helps maintain the ecosystem.

But when you do it differently and at a much larger scale, it of course reduces the balance. It destabilises that balance.

Ghazipur landfill, East Delhi, continues to receive thousands of tonnes of municipal solid waste daily from the capital’s waste stream. Rising above the surrounding neighbourhoods, the site reflects the scale of urban consumption and the limits of existing waste segregation and processing systems in Delhi. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

GOWHAR GEELANI: Muslim Jan, you are also engaged with civil society in Kashmir. Is the environment part of those conversations? And what responsibilities do communities bear in responding to this ecological crisis?

MUSLIM JAN: I feel sorry on that front. I should use the word “we”. It’s a shared responsibility, basically. It’s the government, but at the same time, civil society, communities, corporates, the media, and every individual are responsible. Everybody is responsible for saving biodiversity and the environment. So when the government makes certain issues political, even civil society does not play its role effectively. I’ll tell you one thing. You have Friday sermons every week in the mosques. I have not seen any khateeb (sermoniser), maulvi, or imam (the one who leads the prayer) take up the environment as an issue for six months and say that it should be our core concern during this period, discussed every Friday. Because, I mean, collectively, nobody wants to touch it, even though it is an ethical obligation for each one of us.

GOWHAR GEELANI: You are suggesting that religious leaders and sermonizers have a meaningful role to play in environmental awareness. That brings me to another point. One of the most revered saints from Kashmir is Sheikh Nooruddin, whom we lovingly call Sheikh-ul-Alam and Nund Reshi. In one of his poetic verses, he said in Kashmiri, “Ann poshi teli yeli wan poshi,” which means that if you preserve your forests, you will preserve your grain.

MUSLIM JAN: Absolutely. I will make one point here. I recently visited a place whose name I had heard for the first time—Palle Maidan. You should see the vandalism of natural resources there. You don’t find trees. Deforestation has happened so mercilessly that you can see the carcasses of animals lying around. The water is polluted as well. I’m not against anyone. Tourists have to come, and the nomads have to move through these areas because they need to feed their animals.

But the point is that everybody has a responsibility to preserve the same nature for future generations. And, as Furkan Jan rightly said, this is a present problem. It’s not a problem of the future, nor is it something in the past. We are living in a very suffocating environment right now. Even Mahboob Saba has spoken about how the glaciers are behaving now. When you breathe polluted air, it leads to so many health issues. You have children suffering from bronchitis, and you have cancers that are linked to the water people use—the dirty water. You can see the Sindh, where there is garbage, including diapers, along the banks. And at the same time, the government is equally responsible when it gives permission to any corporate entity or agency—whether it is a security agency or any other agency—to use these embankments and areas near water bodies. Because where does the waste go? It goes directly into the water.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Furkan, you live in Srinagar’s downtown area, close to what used to be Anchar Lake. Now it is home to a dumping site, Achan. As a Srinagarite, how do you respond to that?

FURKAN JAN: One hundred and twenty-three acres of what was a lake have been converted into a dumping ground. There is something called waste segregation and treatment, which has utterly failed in Kashmir. Most people here have never been educated about separating wet waste, dry waste, or plastics. None of that infrastructure exists. So Anchar is gone. Every time it rains, toxins from the dump leach into whatever remains of the lake.

The communities around Hawal, Nowshahra, and Soura—who live near the dump—reportedly face discrimination in matrimonial proposals. Families refuse matches from these neighbourhoods, believing residents carry disease or face health risks. This is how environmental collapse enters the social fabric. An issue as intimate as marriage has become linked to environmental degradation.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Peerzada Mahboob, there is also the problem of mandate. Dal Lake falls under the LCMA (J&K Lake Conservation and Management Authority), other water bodies under the Forest Department, others under Irrigation, and so on. Each department passes responsibility to the next. Is there a case for a single regulatory body overseeing all water bodies? Where does the buck stop? And separately, are we facing a crisis of over-tourism?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: On the issue of departmental silos: the problem begins with the fact that most officers posted in these departments are generalists, not specialists. Our bureaucratic system places administrators—not scientists, not ecologists—in charge of technically complex environmental matters. The solution is to bring in domain experts: hydrologists, limnologists, geologists, and ornithologists. Academia alone cannot carry this burden; we need practising scientists embedded in the decision-making process.

One of the most damning findings of the CAG report was that funds were available but went unutilised. This is a systemic failure—not of resources, but of expertise and accountability.

Let me give an example from a neighbouring Himalayan state. The Char Dham project in Uttarakhand—connecting Badrinath, Yamunotri, Gangotri, and Kedarnath—is a Rs. 12,000 crore road-widening project spanning roughly 900 kilometres. For infrastructure projects exceeding 100 kilometres, an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is legally required.

To bypass this, the project was divided into 53 smaller sub-projects, each kept below the threshold requiring an EIA. Additionally, a 2012 exemption for border-area construction was invoked to further circumvent scrutiny. And we saw what happened to Joshimath. The town has been sinking due to geological instability triggered by unplanned construction—exactly the kind of catastrophe that Himalayan ecology is susceptible to. A detailed account was published in Frontline in 2023.

What happens in Uttarakhand is not geographically remote from Jammu and Kashmir. We share the same Himalayan belt, the same geological vulnerabilities. Bypassing environmental law for populism or political convenience is not a local calculation—it is killing people.

Participants row towards the finish line during the first ever traditional boat race for women in the Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir in November 2024. | Photo Credit: IMRAN NISSAR

GOWHAR GEELANI: Only 56 per cent of Dal Lake is now open water. The rest is occupied by floating gardens, houseboats, and encroachments. What concrete steps need to be taken? We have identified the problems at the community level, the governmental level, and the scientific level. What are the solutions?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: First, it is important to understand that these are not merely lakes—they are wetlands. Dal Lake is a wetland. Wular is a wetland. Hokersar is a wetland. A wetland functions like a kidney for the landscape: it filters water, recharges groundwater, and regulates the broader hydrological cycle. Remove the wetlands, and you have removed the kidneys from the body. The ecological consequences are irreversible within a human timescale.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Of the 697 lakes surveyed by the CAG, 315—that is 45 per cent—have already receded, and 518 across Jammu and Kashmir have either shrunk or vanished entirely. Do we need to take it very seriously, or is it just a bureaucratic statistic?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: The CAG is an independent constitutional body, and its report is a serious indictment of government performance over time. In 2023, NASA published satellite imagery showing the alarming retreat of the Baltal glacier. Did we act on it? No. And now the CAG report arrives, and again we are having event-driven conversations. The response must be structural, not episodic or event driven.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Professor Muslim Jan, from the media and civil society perspective—what are the actionable steps? You mentioned the role of Friday sermons earlier. Kashmir Life has been doing commendable in-depth work. What else?

MUSLIM JAN: It has to be a collective undertaking—government, communities, corporates, media, and religious institutions, each fulfilling their specific role. The government must enforce environmental regulations strictly and hold polluters accountable. Communities must own the responsibility because they are the ones bearing the consequences—respiratory illness, contaminated water, diminished livelihoods.

For journalism students contemplating a career in environmental reporting: this beat offers more stories than almost any other. You can become a genuine subject-matter expert. There is a vast, underreported landscape waiting. But it cannot be two outlets or three individuals—every major newsroom needs dedicated reporters on this beat.

And the standard must go beyond symbolic reporting. If I drop a piece of litter in Singapore, I pay a fine. The streets are clean because enforcement is taken seriously and citizens internalise it as a civic duty. We need that combination of legal accountability and ethical commitment here. The environment must become a matter of public policy—not just government programmes, but a governance framework that compels action at every level.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Furkan, for your generation—what are the doables? How do you persuade your peers that environmental protection must be our first priority?

FURKAN JAN: I am 21. I live in a society where a 40-year-old is called a young politician. That tells you something about intergenerational power. This responsibility has never genuinely been handed to us. We try—we keep our surroundings clean, we raise awareness in our circles. But at the structural level, the government must act.

Consider the 2014 floods. The same political establishment in power then is in power now. No scientific assessment was carried out to understand why the flooding occurred at that scale. Promises to clear encroachments from Dal and Wular—made 20 to 25 years ago—have not been fulfilled. Encroachment has proliferated instead.

Hokersar used to receive migratory birds along the Central Asian Flyway—from as far as Siberia. Birds do not migrate for scenery; they come to breed. If the wetlands that support their breeding are destroyed, those species face extinction.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Peerzada Mahboob, two questions: How do we stop the ongoing colonisation of our lakes? And what are your concluding thoughts? We have established that awareness exists—what needs to go beyond it?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: The response cannot be symbolic or rhetorical. The most urgent step is to bring in domain experts: practising scientists, geologists, ornithologists, and other specialists critical to ecosystem survival. Generalist administrators cannot manage what they do not understand.

Consider what is happening in Srinagar, a smart city. In one rural district of Kashmir—I will not name it—authorities built what was described as a sewage treatment plant. It is not a treatment plant. It is a building where waste is deposited, filled up, and replaced with more waste, with zero actual treatment. This facility sits just 150 metres from the district’s most important river.

When I raised the issue with the officer responsible, he said he had no funds to procure the necessary machinery. I asked him: if you had no funds, why build it at all? His answer was, “It will do for now.”

That attitude—“it will do for now”—will eventually cost us our water, our air, and our future.

The colonisation of our water bodies must end. We need to recognise that this land is ours—and preserving it is not optional. I will say this plainly: if you are going to vote in the next election, make this your criterion.

GOWHAR GEELANI: There is also the issue of environmental activists. They often mobilise only when a crisis is visible—a chinar tree cut down, a controversy at Amar Singh College, trees felled in Dara Shikoh Park. But the slow, chronic destruction goes unreported and unchallenged. Should we not hold all stakeholders—governments, opposition parties, civil society—equally accountable for this sustained failure?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: This is not a blame game. What we need is synergy: between academia, industry, policy, and science. And within academia, environmental research must be treated as a strategic priority—not a peripheral discipline.

Over five years, the government spent approximately Rs. 500 crores—roughly 1 per cent of the total budget—on lake conservation, with little to show for it. The problem is not always a lack of funds; it is a lack of expertise and accountability.

On the question of outsourcing: I am not advocating privatisation. But where the state currently lacks the technical capacity to deliver results, bringing in external experts is a pragmatic transitional step—one that allows our own officers to learn on the job, build institutional knowledge, and eventually manage these processes independently.

GOWHAR GEELANI: Is there also a concern that researchers who have worked on lake preservation have faced pressure or pushback from those in power precisely because of their findings?

PEERZADA MAHBOOB UL HAQ: The populist factor is real. As a researcher, if I conduct a field study—on Dal Lake or Nigeen Lake, for instance—and produce an objective report identifying a specific violation, say a household discharging sewage directly into the lake, and I submit that report to the government, what happens? It gets brushed aside. Not because the findings are wrong, but because acting on them is politically inconvenient. That is the populist narrative at work.

This is why public pressure matters. People need to get active and demand accountability. That said, I want to be clear: in a place like Kashmir, the government must also do considerably more than it has.

FURKAN JAN: I am watching the National Green Tribunal closely—it has taken suo motu cognisance of the situation and is awaiting responses from the concerned departments. And I will say this again: nature has the capacity to heal itself—but only if we allow it to. Stop the encroachments. Stop the sewage dumping. Stop the waste, not as a future aspiration. It has to be done now.