By Sarwar Kashani, IANS
Srinagar : Every dawn, the Dal Lake in the heart of the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir jostles with business activity. A serpentine queue of boats loaded with fresh green vegetables makes its way to a floating market there.
The lake may be dying of pollution but like mother nature it continues to feed thousands of farmer families who grow vegetables on its floating gardens and also trade there, doing business worth a whopping Rs.350 million annually.
The much-relished nadru (lotus stem) and haakh (a long green-leafed vegetable of the brassica family) – are grown in the lake. Boats full of such vegetables sail to Guder – a wholesale floating market for this “unorganised but rich business sector”.
Farmers – the biggest encroachers of this water body – sell the vegetables at prices that cannot be bargained over because the sellers enjoy hegemony.
On an average, 30 tonnes of vegetables from the lake are supplied daily to the vegetable markets of the state, besides army cantonments across the Kashmir valley.
“It is an unorganised sector. But according to rough calculations, vegetables worth over Rs.350 million annually are sold here,” says Zameer Ahmed Qadri, an environmental activist, who has been creating awareness about saving this dying lake of Kashmir.
The picturesque lake surrounded by hills on its eastern and southeastern sides serves as a major tourist attraction of Srinagar, so much so that no visit to Kashmir seems complete without it.
Rock band Led Zeppelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant, was so moved by it that he penned “Kashmir”, a rock anthem. “Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face; stars to fill my dream. I am a traveller of both time and space; to be where I have been,” Plant sang in what he says is the band’s best musical achievement.
In the 13th century, the lake’s area was 75 sq km. However, the lake has been reduced to an area of 11 sq km from 25 sq km in the early 1920s due to encroachment and pollution.
In the existing area, four sq km is made up of marshy land or floating gardens called “raadh” in vernacular. The floating gardens are solid landmasses, which have been created by putting soil on dried weeds in the water.
The city’s sewage flows into the lake and human refuse from houseboats is discharged into it, which has resulted in deterioration of the lake’s water quality and in the snuffing out of its vast aquatic life.
The presence of vegetable-producing floating gardens inside the lake is also among the primary causes of the lake’s deterioration, as it is believed that farmers use pesticides and fertilisers to augment their produce.
In Kashmir – perhaps the only place in the world where this is the case – people have proprietary rights over water bodies granted to them by the rulers of the area almost 100 years ago.
According to official records, 300,000 people live in the catchment area of the lake and over 30,000 live on the lake itself, tending to their floating gardens.
“The floating gardens have threatened the very existence of the lake as the plant debris from it has made the lake shallow, from 17 feet a decade ago to only nine feet now,” Qadri said.
“This is sheer human apathy, and a worst example we will find nowhere in the world.”
(Sarwar Kashani can be contacted at [email protected])