Srinagar has never wanted for admirers. The shimmer of Dal Lake, the terraced symmetry of the Mughal gardens, the snow that crowns the horizon — these have drawn travellers for centuries and, in the years since the changes of August 2019, have drawn them again in growing numbers. Yet the visitor who leaves the Valley carries a divided memory: of a landscape that enchants and of public spaces that too often disappoint. The threat to this city is no longer the one that dominated headlines for three decades. It is quieter, more insidious, and entirely of the citizen’s own making.
The evidence is on daily display. Plastic wrappers gather in the Jhelum and its feeder channels; Dal Lake, a living source of livelihood and tourism, labours under untreated sewage and floating waste; and the lanes of the old city, of Lal Chowk and Residency Road, bear the recurring marks of littering and open dumping. That the municipality sweeps these streets and mounts awareness drives is not in doubt. That the filth returns within days is the more telling fact. It signals a civic culture in which cleanliness is understood as the state’s obligation rather than a shared one.
To be fair, official effort has not been wanting. Mechanised cleaning, waste-segregation pilots, penalties for violation and a broader green push mark a serious attempt to align Srinagar with the aspirations of a modern city. But enforcement is a blunt instrument where habit is the real adversary. A shopkeeper who sweeps refuse onto the road, a houseboat that discharges into the lake, a child who drops a wrapper on the walk to school — each act is small, and each is defended by the assumption that someone else will clean up. Together they impose a heavy toll: water-borne disease, a strained ecology, and damage to an economy that leans almost wholly on hospitality and handicraft.
The remedy is neither costly nor complicated. It begins in the home, where children learn the small disciplines of the dustbin and the refused plastic bag. It grows through neighbourhood shramdaan around Hazratbal and Nishat Bagh, and through a younger generation, better educated and less encumbered by conflict, willing to shame neglect and celebrate care. There is, too, a moral resource close at hand: the Islamic emphasis on *tahara*, on purity and stewardship of the earth, which speaks directly to this duty.
Srinagar’s beauty is a trust held on behalf of those who will inherit it. As normalcy returns and the roads and airports fill, the city’s citizens must now match the government’s exertion with their own accountability. The Valley cannot be legislated clean. It must be kept so.
