This year the Union Territory witnessed a record amount of seasonal snow not only on the former lake bed but also in the higher reaches of the neighbouring mountains.
Old records explain that whenever the Valley was hit by floods, they came mainly in the autumn season. One should be grateful to the tradition of chroniclers who over the past centuries left for our reading the stories of deluges that have hit the Valley since the 9th century. We are not going to repeat these events, but we will still submit that each disaster has brought about its own set of miseries; loss of property and lives. But the stoic Kashmiri population has not learnt its lessons. This is one reason why I have titled this essay in such black humour.
Since public memory is short I will only recall the deluge in the Valley that came in 2010 and 2014. Heavy rains in the catchment areas had drenched the soil to its saturating point and when the snow also started melting, it brought a couple of flash floods which caused Jhelum to spill over its waters over a wide stretch of low lying wetlands. The flood waters did not drain immediately which again caused more permanent damages to houses, roads and standing crop. But Kashmiri have no genes to plan for disasters. It’s their sense of fatalism which has helped succeeding administrations to file the old memories and move ahead to other matters of politics.
The past deluges did indeed lead to a review of the existing anti flood schemes and many causes for the flood that occurred, were identified. The anti flood review led to a major conclusion that the major rivers in Kashmir had been greatly encroached upon along their river beds with new constructions, the old lakes which could absorb excess waters were also drained out and filled to provide new construction activities. It was noted that the cause of flash-floods in more intensity were due to deforestations of the surrounding woodlands which did not stop the rush of waters. A survey of existing anti flood measures revealed that farmers had breached the old flood embankments in the flood diversion canals and made them ineffective, that the old flood water diversion canals were again also found to be in disuse and not dredged to deepen their water holding capacity. That list is still long and makes for sad reading.
An interesting finding was that the popular Administration had also neglected to improved the water holding capacity of the major lakes like Wular, Dal, Nageen, Manasbal etc. Wular’s water holding area had shrunk from 24,000 hectres to only 2000 hectres; Dal lakes water body was now only 50 percent of its former self. These were very big water reservoirs but degraded by human misuse and greed.
A new technical obstruction was the Indus Water Treaty which prevented the government to revise some old existing clauses so that anti flood measures could be revised with time. Many experts were suggesting to dam the small rivers and even create a water holding dam on Jehlum at Wular and add a water regulator on the river at Dal, but feared that Pakistan would see this as a security weapon to cause artificial floods on the Pakistan side if it came for the crunch.
We are of the view that we have the right to fill up the existing lakes in the Valley which have shrunk in size and thus increase their water holding capacity which should work to hold back flood waters in consultation with the Treaty regulators during the flood season. There could be an agreement to release some of the held back water in the lean season into Pakistan from the Wular lake at least to mitigate the water scarcity which comes about each year. We are presently developing major irrigations scheme in Uri and the Kishanganga catchment area for run of the river power generation systems but let us convince Pakistan that we want to also hold some of our wasted water during the flood season to replenish the lost water capacity of our lakes.
The anti flood measures planned after 2012, had included a three phase scheme of redeveloping the entire irrigation system connected with river Jhelum. The first phase of plugging all the breeched embankments which numbered over 1800, were repaired. The development of more diversion canals were still to take off. Nobody remembers what was the third phase of anti flood controls!
Last month the UT administration has got in touch with some official Space agencies in UK to share their data on the rivers and glaciers in the Kashmir water catchment areas. This exercise seems futile since what we need is also to go back to the drawing board and check if the old recommendations of expert committees have been implemented or not. We also need to get some recommendations from the long staying security forces, on what measures should be put on ground so that the police departments can organize their relief work with ease. The Uttarakhand Tragedy should again be used as a warning call to study how the relief work is underway to help teach the villagers, and in the case of Kashmir to reach the unauthorized residential colonies and suburbs. Then old tested methods of flood controls may still not work and new anti flood networks may be necessary to be planned for the whole Valley. As a beginning I may recommend the irrigation engineers of the government to go and see the anti flood measures existing for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Authority who have by their far reaching schemes saved their city from deluges since 1912.
A small beginning may be made by getting some wise citizens of Srinagar to file a PIL in the State High Court seeking to know how in the next one year the State government is going to save its citizens from another Great Biblical flood. In this respect it is not only the Valley that is involved, remember what happened to Leh when there was a cloud burst and to Jammu, when another cloud burst in Tawi lay waste a major part of the ancient city, not many moons ago. As I said, we lack the genes to prepare our body defense against Nature’s fury.
Gautam Kaul is Chairman, Vitasta Healthcare Trust, Jammu