Boatman Noor Muhammad struggles to row as his boat moves deep into the famed Dal Lake in Srinagar, the most city in Indian-administered Kashmir. He presses hard on his oar to untangle the vessel from thick vegetation.
“It is extremely difficult to paddle through most of the lake,” he complains. He says authorities “spend tons of cash but they don’t clean it properly”.
Weeds, silt, and untreated sewage are increasingly choking the sprawling scenic lake, which dominates the town and draws tens of thousands of tourists annually.
Dal Lake appears pristine within the area where many exquisitely decorated houseboats bob on its surface which tourists and honeymooners rent.
But farther from shore, the lake may be a mixture of mossy swamps, thick weeds, trash-strewn patches, and floating gardens made up of rafts of reeds.
Research by the University of Kashmir in 2016 found that only 20 percent of the lake’s water was relatively clean while 32 percent was severely degraded.
At least 15 big drains within the city empty into the sprawling lake, contaminating it with sewage and pollutants like phosphorous and nitrogen, officials say.
Tariq Ahmad, a houseboat owner, says about 900 registered houseboats contribute only a “small fraction” of the pollution within the lake.
In response to a Right to Information request from Ahmad, authorities said in 2017 that about 44 million liters (11 million gallons) of sewage was released into the lake from the town every day.
In addition, about a million liters (260,000 gallons) of sewage came from houseboats, they said.
Officials insist they’re doing everything possible to save lots of the fast-degrading lake.
Bashir Ahmed, a government official supervising the lake’s cleaning, said they’re conducting regular weeding, treating quite 30 million liters (eight million gallons) of sewage each day, and demolishing illegal structures within the lake’s catchment basin.
“This is an urbanized lake. we’ve to know that there’s an enormous amount of sewage within the lake,” Ahmed said.
More than a dozen mechanical dredgers are deployed to obtain silt and weeds, while many workers, some in small wooden boats, haul the fetid waste from the lake.
Environmentalists say efforts like removing the weeds have helped, but more must be done to save lots of the lake, especially from untreated sewage.
“If you’ve stopped the poison from one side then you permit the poison to return from the opposite side, it really doesn’t make any sense,” said environmentalist Aijaz Rasool.
