On September 6, when the floodwaters first started appearing in the Rambagh neighbourhood of Srinagar, Shakeel Ahmad and a dozen of his neighbours stood under a ceaseless downpour, shouting at each other for sandbags. In surprise, they stared at the small cement drain that meandered through their neighbourhood. Torrents of waters came rushing through it, inches away from overflowing its small embankments and pouring into their low-lying houses on both sides. The drain, they rued, would be the one to drown them. It did drown them later that evening. But the drain, Ahmad’s father, Mohammad Subhan, later said, was not always a narrow drain.

“It used to be a big stream when I was young, carrying water from the Doodh-Ganga (flood channel) to the paddy lands deep inside and it was several times the size of what is left of it today. But we shrunk it so much with our mindless constructions that we only thought of it as a drain only now,” Mr. Subhan said.

But the water reclaimed its territory, he said, and it included my house too. In the September floods, the worst that the valley saw in more than a century, the water temporarily reclaimed its former spaces that, over the decades, have been occupied with relentless illegal construction of houses and shops and businesses.

“While we can’t say that the floods were a manmade disaster because it was caused by the enormous rain, we can say for sure that that the devastation it caused was manmade,” Shakil Ahmad Romshoo, Head of Department at the Earth Sciences Department in Kashmir University, told The Hindu.

Dr. Romshoo has over the years written ceaselessly about the loss of waterbodies and wetlands in the State and the threat they hold for the valley. “We are a low-lying valley and the problem is that there is only one way for the water to leave; on the other three sides, we are bound by tall mountains,” he says. “But nature has a balance and that is why we have had an abundance of lakes and wetlands and if they were in their former condition they would have saved us from this devastation.”

Wetlands function like a sponge, absorbing water when there is too much of it and releasing it during the lean period. According to scientists in Kashmir, the wetlands are slowly disappearing and those left are increasingly losing their ability to absorb water.

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