Let our wetlands breath again
Kashmir is not only a valley of mountains and rivers, not only a spectacle of chinars in autumn or meadows bursting with wildflowers. Kashmir is also a valley of water—of veins and arteries running like blue threads through her fragile body. Wetlands. Hokarsar, Haigam, Mirgund, Shallabugh, Wular. And the unnamed, unnoticed ones, scattered like fragments of broken mirrors across her landscape. They are the lungs of Kashmir, breathing silently, holding life not just for the valley but for the migratory world that begins in the Arctic tundra and stretches to the Indian plains.
Hokarsar, once called the “queen of wetlands,” lies now in the throes of suffocation. Its waters, once deep and shimmering, are thinning into silt and drainage. Canals that fed her veins have been pinched shut, but still the mallards circle, stubbornly returning. After three months the sky will thrash with wings—pintails, gadwalls, shovellers, teals—pilgrims from Siberia and Central Asia. Will they find refuge, or only mud and silence?
Further north, Haigam, in Baramulla district, stands bewildered at its own disfigurement. Once it stretched wide with reed beds and fish, now its body shrinks. Mirgund, sandwiched between Sopore and Baramulla, fragile but vital, is a resting stop on the invisible aerial highway. Shallabugh, spread across Ganderbal, once held half a million birds in its arms. Imagine it—half a million wings beating over the reed beds. Today it gasps in fragments. And Wular, the great epic of Asia’s freshwater lakes, mentioned in chronicles and songs, guardian against floods, regulator of climate—It too is shrinking, its shoulders burdened by silt and settlements.
This is not only about birds or water. When wetlands fade, cultures fade. The “haenz”—the fisherfolk who rowed their “shikaras”—lose not only their livelihood but their very identity. Children who once chased dragonflies by reed beds now wander by garbage heaps. When wetlands fall silent, the songs of the valley change.
And yet, amid this despair, there is still a heartbeat. Researchers, poets, birdwatchers, ordinary villagers—they remind us that these wetlands are not wastelands but temples of survival. Prof. A. R. Yousuf calls them the “kidneys and lungs of the valley.” Others—Dr. Riyaz Ahmad Dar, Dr. Irfan Rashid, Dr. Gowhar Naseem—have shown us, through science and fieldwork, what happens when we lose them. But science alone cannot rescue them.
Dr. Asad Rahmani, former Director of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) ,who has spent decades studying birds and habitats in Kashmir, has a simpler truth. He says: people matter. Even small voices can shift the tide. For fifteen years, he has been urging communities, students, teachers, birdwatchers to see wetlands as living beings worth protecting. He believes that if even a fraction of us speak for them, stand by them, act for them, the difference will be felt. Protection is not a task for distant authorities, but for those who live by the waters, walk their banks, breathe their air.
So the call must be to us—the people. To remember that wetlands are sponges against floods. That without Hokarsar and Shallabugh, Srinagar is more vulnerable to disasters like 2014. That wetlands recharge groundwater, filter pollution, nourish cattle, sustain agriculture. That they are nurseries for fish, pit stops for birds carrying stories across continents. To destroy them is to erase the memory of migration itself.
What then must we do? Perhaps begin with memory. Take children not just to Mughal Gardens, but to Hokarsar, to sit quietly and watch wings descend. Tell them stories of Wular, of fisherfolk, of floods once softened by its breadth. Create eco-clubs that see wetlands not as tourist sites but as classrooms of survival. Encourage communities to guard their reed beds, to clean their edges, to see them as extensions of their own homes. Birdwatchers can become guardians, schools can adopt wetlands, poets can write their laments, villagers can restore their streams.
This is not a war for governments to fight alone. It is a love affair between people and water, between memory and place. If each family along these wetlands picks up even a handful of responsibility—keeping one canal unclogged, planting reeds, saying no to dumping—an entire ecology can be rescued.
Because if Kashmir is paradise, then wetlands are its breath. A paradise without breath is not paradise—it is only a corpse dressed in flowers.
And after three months, when the sky fills with wings, geese and swans and ducks arriving from Kazakhstan and Mongolia, let them find not silence and sewage but water that still holds them, reeds that still whisper welcome.
Perhaps then, future generations will not ask how a valley famed for its waters allowed them to dry. Perhaps then, the answer will not be silence. It will be the sound of wings returning, again and again, to the breathing lungs of Kashmir.
Khursheed Dar, writes about Kashmiri culture, society and Sufism
