Srinagar recorded 25.7 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, 4.2 degrees below normal, as widespread rain kept the Valley soaked for a third straight day. The Meteorological Department has extended its flood warning to August 5, forecasting torrential showers and the risk of flash floods and landslides across the Jammu division in particular. In the twenty-four hours ending Wednesday morning, Samba received 87 mm of rain, Katra 71.2 mm, Udhampur 65 mm and Jammu 52 mm. In Beerwah, Budgam, roughly 32 shops in the local market took on water and suffered losses when the recent spell of heavy rainfall overwhelmed the town’s drains.
These are not abstractions. They are the numbers of a season that repeats itself in Kashmir every year, where each monsoon becomes a test the region’s infrastructure fails in some measure.
To its credit, the response this time has not been silent. The Centre has moved to send an assessment team to Jammu and Kashmir to survey the damage to public and private property, with an initial report expected soon. PDP president Mehbooba Mufti visited the flooded Beerwah market herself, heard shopkeepers describe their losses, and pressed the administration for prompt compensation and, more usefully, for the drainage upgrades that might prevent the next flood rather than merely pay for this one. That is the right instinct. Relief matters, but prevention matters more.
Still, credit for turning up after the water recedes cannot substitute for the harder work of showing up before it rises. The administration bears the first responsibility here: town drains in Beerwah and in dozens of similar markets across the Valley have been inadequate for years, a fact known well before this week’s rain fell. Traders and shopkeepers have limited power to fix drainage systems themselves, but they can organise through market associations to hold local authorities accountable between floods, not only after them. And citizens more broadly need to stop treating monsoon damage as an act of God rather than a governance failure with a paper trail behind it.
Kashmir has been here before. The 2014 floods, which submerged parts of Srinagar for weeks and cost the region billions in losses, were meant to be the moment infrastructure planning changed for good. Twelve years on, a market in Beerwah still floods after a few days of heavy rain. That is not bad luck. That is the absence of institutional memory.
A society is measured not by how it mourns its floods but by how it drains them. Kashmir keeps proving it remembers how to grieve. It still has to prove it remembers how to prepare.
