Bilal Ahmed, 18, has lived all his life inside Dal Lake – within one of the hamlets that dot this lake in Kashmir. He talks fondly of his childhood memories of the lake - rowing Shikaras with his father at sunsets. But now the lake is dying and like Bilal, the fifty thousand people living inside it are one of the major reasons. Should they live inside Dal or should the Government relocate them? What will happen to the Tourism industry, if the Dal dwellers are completely taken out?

The answers to these questions are crucial to the very future of this water body and a detailed investigation carried out by Roorkee University’s Alternate Hydro Energy Centre had put forth five viable options before the Government. But nobody’s listens even to this expert opinion – the report is eating dust in government offices since it was submitted in 2000.

The Dal Lake is unique because people live inside it in hamlets and houseboats and cultivate vegetables in the floating gardens within its waters. The pollution generated by this population – which is increasing – has put the very existence of the lake at stake.

According to the Detailed Project Report for the Conservation and Management of Dal-Nagin Lakes prepared by the University of Roorkee, one of the main problems facing these lakes was found to be the “increased pollution because of the increasing number of lake dwellers and floating gardens, entry of untreated sewage and solid waste from the peripheral areas and from the hamlets and house boats”.

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