Stinking City

The summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, Srinagar, is dressing-up for what the government has begun trumpeting as a tourist boom. The city’s civil lines areas and the Boulevard along the world-famous Dal lake in particular are getting a face-lift essentially to bring it in tune with its reputation as a beautiful place. Elsewhere too, way side market places both on Srinagar-Jammu highway and the newly activated Srinagar-Kaman Post sector of Muzaffarabad road, are getting a new coat of paint to lend them a better look. The tourist places like Gulmarg, Pahalgam, Sonamarg, Achhabal, Kokernag and the Mughal gardens wear a particularly festive look in anticipation of a heavy influx of visitors, domestic as well as foreign.

During recent months, the chief minister, Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, and his tourist officials went places across the globe, even when some nasty avalanches had caused widespread loss of life and property back home, to invite the pleasure-seekers to the state. During his meetings with visiting dignitaries and diplomats here or elsewhere, he has been urging the western countries to withdraw the adverse travel advisories to their nationals to visit Kashmir.

Regardless of the hellish conditions obtaining at present as a result of the on-going turmoil, Kashmir is popularly known as the paradise on the earth. And, Srinagar as the city of lakes and gardens.

Understandably, the better part of the valley’s and city’s social and economic lot is inter-twined essentially with their beauty. Hundreds of thousands of people draw their sustenance directly or indirectly from the tourist trade and allied sectors. They comprise hotel and restaurant owners, tour and travel operators, taxi and shikara owners, ponywallas and labourers besides a host of traders and manufacturers including those in the handicraft and related sectors.

The number of families dependent upon tourism could be anybody’s guess. In fact, the state’s economy owes a great deal to this sector. Mercifully, the past couple of years witnessed some kind of a boom with even the available infrastructure falling short of the requirement and forcing the authorities to ask the inhabitants of various specified areas to throw their spare accommodation open to the visitors.

However, the atmospherics for ensuing season would seem to be not as inviting as one would perhaps wish them to be. The places that were considered to be almost entirely free for any kind of pollution, are

nauseatingly stinking. The city and most towns lack adequate sanitation with their civic bodies ill-equipped to match the requirement. In most cases they don’t have enough manpower and equipment for disposal of ever increasing quantities of garbage.

Absence of a matching drainage and sewerage system only aggravates the problem. Most drains and water courses are almost entirely choked with filth and polythene with the authorities preferring to look the other way. The number of public conveniences is abysmally less and even in civil lines areas people are founding easing themselves in the open on the road side. A solitary community latrine along Partap Park is a mute witness to the incapability of the civic administration to address the problem. Most roads, lanes and bylanes in the city and elsewhere speak

volumes about the official neglect. Barring a few arteries in the civil lines like the Maulana Azad Road and Residency Road, both having stood the test of time ever since these were renovated not by any popular

government but by a governor, most other roads in the city and in towns present a sight as if these have been strafed. Passage of a vehicle raises columns of dust to force the pedestrians run for cover. Watering of the roads is restricted to areas around the civil secretariat only. Following the recently conducted elections, the city and most towns have full-fledged and upgraded civic bodies to take care of amenities for the citizenry.

The city has a municipal corporation with a mayor and deputy mayor in place. Likewise, major towns of Baramulla, Sopore, Anantnag have municipal councils and others municipal committees. Most such bodies are yet to become fully functional due to the dicey security scenario combined with the alleged apathy and indifference of the coalition government. One would expect the state government to take the matter more earnestly. Unless it staged the civic polls to achieve a limited political objective of claiming the revival of grassroots institutions as a mark of normalcy restoration, it should provide them the required wherewithal for becoming fully functional. Denying them the promised administrative and legal powers and starving them of the needed material and financial resources would suggest the government is not sincere.

All said and done, tourist arrivals alone need not necessarily make one look at the situation. The natives are no less human to deserve a better environment to live in. Nobody would like to breathe in ugly and messy environs of a place, whatever its reputation. On the other hand, improvement in civic life is not the responsibility of the government alone. Nowhere in the world is civic sense perceived as something exclusive to the administration. It has to be a combined effort of the authorities as well as the citizenry to make the environs clean. Before the valued guests start arriving, it is time for both the government and the people to rise to the occasion and launch a vigorous drive for the purpose.

The article is an editorial from KO’s archives and was originally published on May 16, 2005