Abdul Majid Attar
My father used to say that, “Pahalgam does not need so-called development. You cannot make it better by bringing in all the iron and concrete. You just have to make sure this place is clean”. I was in school then, and it stayed with me for a long time. There was some disagreement with this statement initially, but eventually, I understood what he meant.
Fifteen years down the road, there is not a single open space in Pahalgam, all of it has been fenced, and surprisingly, it works, the parks are lush green now, the flowers bloom to their fullest now, and each park has an entry ticket now, that range from Rs 20-100. There are around 15 such parks in Pahalgam, and they have ugly fences. Some of them even have an additional barbed wire over the fence.
After the COVID restrictions were lifted, Pahalgam saw an unprecedented flow of tourists, trekkers, campers, and day picnickers. A small patch of land on the way to Aru has become the hub of camping for the last 2-3 years. The river Lidder flows just adjacent to this site. The Pahalgam Development Authority has even outsourced some part of it for camping purposes. At an estimate, this site received 5,000-10,000 tents this year only. There are two dustbins and a defunct toilet block for the whole site. Every meter of this site is filled with plastic bottles, wrappers, foam sheets, and food waste. You cannot find any place to sit and have your food or enjoy the view. A portion of the waste goes directly into the Lidder; if one spends 5-mins at the bank of Lidder, they will see bottles, polythene, and other waste products floating with the river in alarming proportions.
The situation is similar with every park in Pahalgam; there is no waste management system whatsoever, they are still going with the outdated waste collection system. A reason being outsourcing the parks with no focus on waste management. It will be unfair to talk about recycling and reusing at this point.
Apart from the parks and public spaces, our deep forests and camping sites around Pahalgam have been polluted. A five-minute rainfall brings all the litter down to the roads and clogs the drains. Millions of rupees have been spent on the sanitation and drainage system, but it is useless. It is constantly clogged.
In 2017, I led a team of volunteers from Chandanwari-Sheshnag for a series of cleanliness drives, and it was devastating to see the destruction of the fragile mountainous region, but the situation around other trekking routes in Pahalgam is worse than that now. A friend who has been conducting sustainable travel in these routes from the late ’80s said, “Tarsar-Marsar trek is gone, there is rubbish everywhere, people are camping on the banks of the lakes, I have never camped near Tarsar in my 30-years of trekking. The sudden rush of local travellers has destroyed the base camp (Lidderwath) and the surrounding lakes in Aru Pahalgam. I highly doubt that the European trekkers will come back again for those treks.”
Another major polluter and exploiter are the national trekking companies. A worried local trekking operator said that they plan to have their permanent base camps at Lidderwath and Sekhwas for months (late May-Ending August). They pitch their base camp for 15-days altogether. One can imagine its consequences on the surroundings and immediately on the patch of land they will occupy. That patch of land will never be green again.
I have read about their “Bring back your Trash” slogans but is it all that they could do for a place that generates revenue for them (Trekking Companies)?
A meeting was held in Ladakh recently that was chaired by the Hon. Lt Governor of the UT, and the focus of the meeting was to “Make Ladakh Plastic Free”. I highly doubt that a similar meeting has ever happened in Pahalgam or any other tourist resorts in Kashmir. Some crores of rupees were spent on getting machinery for treating SW and WW, the plan was to make road-construction material from the solid waste and compost out of the enormous wet waste generated by the hotels, but I don’t think that is also happening. I don’t know of any place in Pahalgam that follows the source segregation, which is an essential part of this.
The focus of our development authority is to build fences and ugly iron-concrete bridges. You should be surprised that there is not a single rope-way bridge in Pahalgam. There are huge iron-concrete bridges in Pahalgam that lead to nowhere, literally.
The situation might look disastrous, but we still have time. We need to act now. The focus of our development agencies must shift from conventional development models to sustainable development. The agencies must be equipped with specialists in waste management, landscape architecture, and sustainable development overall. Bringing in the tested and tried waste management models from the developed countries could start towards sustainable development. In my opinion, we should immediately stop all the development work and focus on environmental conservation. The major contributors to this waste problem are Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Amul, Parle, etcetera. These companies need to be held accountable. They should contribute to introducing recycling systems to the region.
Each of us has a part to play in this; the local community is the primary stakeholder in all of this, followed by the Pahalgam Development Authority, Municipal committee, and other departments like wildlife, forest, and fisheries. There should be an extensive awareness campaign around it, roping in school children, tourism industry stakeholders, and government employees. The travel influencers could be leveraged to make awareness content around it. The annual budget of the PDA must have a significant portion towards waste management.
The lack of human resources (specialists) could be substituted by introducing various internships and fellowships. Providing accommodation, food and a stipend we could bring in specialists from various parts of India and the world. The last decade has seen promising growth in the organizations working around sustainable development, and there could be collaborations between the government agencies and those organizations.
If we do not act now, the situation will deteriorate at an alarming rate, and the place will gradually see a decline in tourism, which will directly affect the employment of lakhs of people who are dependent on tourism in Kashmir.
Abdul Majid Attar is a rural development professional who has been a Naropa Fellow and SBI Youth for India Fellow at Ladakh and Rajasthan respectively.