I. Ahmad Wani
Eight kilometres from Anantnag and fifty-eight from Srinagar, Achabal was once counted among Kashmir’s finest retreats. A Mughal garden, a legendary spring, and forests that framed both together built its reputation across four centuries. Today the town survives largely on that memory. Its schools operate without buildings, its hospital runs without doctors, its streets go without a bus stand, and the green cover that once framed its heritage core is disappearing under unplanned concrete. Achabal is not short of natural or historical wealth. It is short of the administrative will to protect what it already has.
A Spring Fit for Empresses
Kalhana’s twelfth-century chronicle Rajatarangini traces Achabal’s origins to antiquity, when the site, then known as Akshavala, was founded by Aksha, son of King Nara II of the Gonanditya dynasty. That early history gave the town its name, but its lasting fame belongs to the Mughals. Between 1616 and 1620, Empress Nur Jahan, wife of Emperor Jahangir, built a terraced garden around the town’s natural spring and named it Bagh-e-Begum Abad, later also known as Sahib Abad. Decades later, Shah Jahan’s daughter Jahanara redesigned and expanded the layout, and a mosque within the garden is credited to Prince Dara Shikoh, her brother. Few gardens in the Mughal chain across Kashmir carry this depth of royal patronage across three generations.
The spring itself carries a local legend that has survived alongside the garden. Its waters are said to be the resurfacing of the Brengi Nallah, a stream that vanishes underground through limestone fissures near the village of Dewalgam some distance away. Villagers once tested the claim by pouring chaff into the river upstream and watching it re-emerge at Achabal days later, a rough but effective demonstration of an underground hydrological link that geologists have since studied more formally. Whether myth or measured fact, the story has given the spring a near-sacred standing in local memory, one that predates and outlasts any single ruler’s patronage.
Set at an elevation of about 1,936 metres at the foot of Sonsanwar Hill, the spring feeds three channels that run through a Mughal garden covering roughly 1,952 square metres, built on Persian chaharbagh principles of symmetry, water, and terraced levels. Fountains and pools punctuate the descent from the upper terrace to the lower, and chinar trees, some claimed to date to the Mughal period itself, still shade the walkways. A small wildlife sanctuary, once a royal game reserve stocked for hunting parties, sits nearby and adds a second layer of ecological value to the site. For generations this combination of chilled spring water, ordered garden, and forested hillside made Achabal one of the most visited halts on any Kashmir itinerary, a status it held well into the late twentieth century before decline set in.
Concrete Where Gardens Stood
That inheritance is disappearing in slow, visible stages. Unplanned shops and residential construction have crept steadily into the green slopes that surround the garden, land that any serious heritage management plan would have designated a protected buffer zone decades ago. Instead, commercial sprawl now presses directly against the garden’s outer walls in places, and the hillside views that once framed the Mughal terraces from a distance are increasingly interrupted by concrete. Garbage collects along the roads and drains leading to the spring itself, and plastic waste has become a routine sight at the very approach to a site that draws pilgrims, tourists, and school groups.
The fountains still play on occasion, and the core garden retains enough of its original character to reward a visit. But the setting around it no longer resembles the retreat that Jahangir once praised for its beauty. What is unfolding here is not simple aesthetic decay. It is a civic and environmental failure with direct consequences for public health, for the tourism economy the town depends on, and for the town’s own sense of identity. A heritage site cannot be preserved in isolation from the town around it, and Achabal’s administration has largely treated the garden and the town as separate problems rather than one.
A School Without a Building
The neglect extends well beyond the garden’s boundary. The Government Girls Higher Secondary School in Achabal has no proper building of its own. It was upgraded from high school to higher secondary status on paper years ago, a change that should have brought new classrooms, science laboratories, a library, and expanded seating capacity. None of that followed. Students and teachers continue to work in cramped, makeshift arrangements that fall well short of what the upgrade promised and well short of what any functioning higher secondary institution requires. The Chief Education Officer has inspected the site more than once and pledged priority construction of a new building, but such assurances have circulated before without translating into a foundation stone, let alone a finished structure. In a district where girls’ education carries particular social weight, and where every additional obstacle disproportionately pushes families toward pulling daughters out early, this delay is difficult to justify on any administrative ground.
A Hospital Without Doctors
Healthcare in Achabal tells a similar story of institutions that exist on paper but falter in practice. The Sub-District Hospital serves as the first point of care for thousands of residents across the town and its surrounding villages, yet it runs chronically short of doctors and paramedical staff. Specialist posts are routinely shown as filled on official rosters while the doctors themselves are, in practice, attached to duties elsewhere, leaving patients to discover the gap only when they arrive for treatment. Many are then referred onward to Anantnag or Srinagar for care that should reasonably be available at a sub-district level. Local delegations have raised the staffing shortage with health authorities repeatedly over the years. Postings have not followed at the pace the town’s population and its growing tourist footfall would justify.
No Bus Stand, Eighty Years On
Perhaps the most visible marker of Achabal’s neglect is the simplest one. More than eight decades after India’s independence, and despite multiple development plans announced over the years, Achabal still has no proper bus stand. Public transport in and around the town remains irregular and overcrowded, a daily hardship for commuters, students, patients heading to or from the hospital, and traders moving goods. This is a hardship that residents of far smaller and more remote habitations elsewhere in the district would find unacceptable, and Achabal’s proximity to the district headquarters at Anantnag makes the absence harder to explain, not easier. Residents and shopkeepers have protested the gap on more than one occasion. Little has changed as a result.
The Cost of Neglect
None of these failures stands alone. Together they explain why a town with genuine, well-documented tourism potential now greets many of its visitors with garbage-strewn approaches and crumbling civic amenities instead of the garden and spring that made it famous in the first place. Trade, horticulture, and small tourism-linked businesses stagnate when basic infrastructure lags this far behind. Young people, facing schools without adequate space and a hospital without adequate staff, increasingly look toward Anantnag or Srinagar for both education and opportunity, a slow but steady drain that weakens the town’s long-term prospects. Land acquisition notices for road widening exist on file, evidence that some planning has taken place. But the larger civic agenda, systematic waste management, school construction, hospital staffing, a functioning bus stand, continues to move at a pace that suggests low administrative priority rather than any genuine shortage of resources or expertise.
What Achabal Is Owed
The remedy here is not complicated, and it does not require innovation. It requires will and follow-through on commitments already made. A completed building for the girls’ higher secondary school. A full complement of doctors and paramedical staff at the sub-district hospital, with postings enforced rather than merely recorded. A proper bus stand serving the town’s actual transport needs. An organised system for waste collection and disposal. Formal protection for the Mughal garden and the hillside that surrounds it, treated as a single heritage zone rather than two unrelated problems.
The spring still flows, exactly as it did when Nur Jahan first walked its banks four centuries ago. The fountains can still play in a garden worth visiting again, set among slopes that are green rather than concrete. What she built has already outlasted the empire that produced it. It should not now be allowed to fail for want of a school building, a functioning doctor’s roster, and a bus stand, ordinary things that ordinary towns across the country take for granted.
