The United Nations set aside August 27 for the world’s lakes. In a Valley that owes its economy, its climate and half its poetry to water, the day passed without a function worth reporting.
Elsewhere on the planet today, schoolchildren pulled plastic out of shallows, mayors made promises, and scientists released data nobody in power wanted to read. That is what World Lake Day is for. It exists because the world’s lakes are vanishing faster than its forests, and because a species that has learned to mourn glaciers has not yet learned to mourn still water.
In Jammu and Kashmir the day went unmarked. No function of any consequence. No civic gathering worth the name. In the one place in India where a lake is not scenery but infrastructure, the calendar turned and nobody looked up.
The silence is not an oversight. It is consistent. We stopped observing these lakes long before we stopped observing their day.
Look at what is being lost while the observances are not held. Dal Lake is smaller than it was in your father’s photographs, and the shrinkage is not mysterious. It is sewage that arrives untreated, encroachment that is regularised after the fact, plastic that circulates with the shikaras, and weed that thickens every summer because the water is now rich in exactly the wrong nutrients. From a houseboat deck the lake still performs beautifully. Below the surface it is short of oxygen, short of fish, and running out of the depth that makes it a lake rather than a marsh.
Wular has fared worse, and Wular matters more. It is a Ramsar site, which is to say the world formally recognised it as a wetland of international importance and then watched it silt up. Wular was the Valley’s flood valve. It absorbed what the Jhelum could not carry, held the fisheries that fed the villages along its rim, and drew migratory birds by the lakh. Siltation, willow plantation, farming pushed into the shallows and steady pollution have converted open water into land. When the water had nowhere to spread in September 2014, we called the result a natural disaster. Some of it was arithmetic.
None of this happened in secret. There is an authority for Dal and an authority for Wular. There have been master plans, dredging contracts, deadlines, relocation packages, budget lines and committees constituted to review the work of earlier committees. The lakes have kept shrinking through all of it. That is the part worth saying plainly on a day meant for saying such things: the machinery of conservation here has become a substitute for conservation, not a route to it.
These are not ornaments. Dal and Wular are the Valley’s water security, its flood defence, its fisheries, its tourism economy and its oldest cultural memory, and they are the only ones we have. Restoration is still technically possible. It requires sewage treatment that actually functions, encroachment reversed rather than pardoned, dredging that is measured in outcomes rather than tenders, and a public that treats a dying lake as a scandal instead of a season.
World Lake Day should have been the occasion to say so out loud in Srinagar. Instead the day slipped past unnoticed, which tells us something more useful than any function would have. A society notices what it intends to save. Until the death of these waters becomes unacceptable to us, the forgetting will continue, and the lakes will keep obliging it.
