Opinion | Srinagar Urban Flooding: Learning Lessons Not Gained Since 2014

On the night of September 3, 2025, Mohammad Ashraf Bulaki and his neighbours in Zinipora, situated close to Pampore, were sitting outside their homes hoping to hear what they had feared for two days. It was at 2:15 am when water started pouring from a broken embankment along the Jhelum River, only 70 to 80 metres from where they were sitting. Eleven years after the devastating floods in September 2014 had brought Srinagar under threat of being inundated, the people residing in its outskirts were again experiencing the same rising floodwaters after only a day of rainfall, unlike those of 2014 which took place following heavy rains.

The difference, one day of heavy rain leading to a flood in 2025 versus several days of continuous rainfall which led to the devastation in 2014, is a clear indication that the risk of floods in Kashmir has not reduced substantially. The findings of the report by the Central Water Commission, conducted after the floods of 2014 on instructions of the Prime Minister’s office, still form an excellent basis to determine the changes in the situation. The assessment determined that the bowl-like physical configuration of the Kashmir Valley region, where the height increases dramatically from approximately 1,600 meters to more than 5,300 meters from three sides but the valley area itself remains quite flat, automatically makes fast drainage of rain water difficult. The Jhelum River has a safe passage capacity of about 900 cumecs, or about 31,700 cusecs.

Since then, the Irrigation and Flood Control Department has claimed to have increased the carrying capacity of the river from about 30,800 cusecs to 41,000 cusecs, through embankments and channel cleaning, which has cost hundreds of crores of rupees, beginning 2015 onwards. However, frequent floods, occurring in 2016, 2021, 2023, and even in 2025, imply that the on-the-ground outcomes have not been proportional to the investment. Officials from the Central Water Commission, in their post-2014 analysis, pinpointed one major factor behind all this, which is much more difficult to undo than the construction of embankments; the construction in low-lying areas which could otherwise absorb the floodwaters naturally, owing to unplanned urbanization in Srinagar outskirts.

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The wetlands are the key element that lies behind this failure. Floodplains surrounding the Jhelum River used to feature a system of natural reservoirs such as Hokersar, the Bemina wetland, the Narakara wetland, the Batamaloo numbal, and Rakh-e-Arth, serving as a sort of buffer capable of taking in excess flows of river during floods due to high rains. This buffering role has been gradually destroyed. As reported by the findings of an audit conducted by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Wular Lake, which is a vital flood basin for the Jhelum River, has lost the ability to store water as a result of sedimentation and encroachment on its shores. According to land use analysis throughout the country from 1967 to 2020, 315 water bodies of Jammu and Kashmir have dried up completely, whereas those that exist today are in very poor condition.

The pollution factor makes the structural drainage aspect even more complex. Environmentalists tracking the water quality of the Jhelum say that urbanization, unregulated river bank encroachment, and constant sewage discharge are some of the factors that have made the river essentially a huge drain of the city, as described by an official of the Pollution Control Board. It is common to find garbage, plastic waste, and sewage drains dumping their contents straight into the river in stretches where the river flows through the city of Srinagar, thereby not only compromising the water quality needed by millions of people relying on the Jhelum for their drinking water, but also reducing the channel’s capacity during floods.

Certainly the most revealing assessment is that offered by those who have been studying the disconnect between planning on paper and implementation on the ground. A recent review of the situation after 2014, for instance, suggests that what Kashmir needed was holistic floodplain management, which included the restoration of the wetlands, the enhancement of natural spillways, reconfiguration of the drainage systems, and overall hydrological reorganization of the Jhelum basin as an integrated whole. While Jammu, which faced a separate problem of floods related to the Tawi basin, needed a similar but separate solution appropriate to its different urban setting, the problem was found to be the fragmentation of the post-2014 interventions into separate infrastructure packages scattered arbitrarily across various sectors and regions without a common strategy. What is worse, the problem seems to lie less with the engineering than the governance failures. The floods of Kashmir, according to the argument, have nothing to do with the extraordinary rainfall combined with insufficient infrastructure. They result from decades of wetland encroachment, scientifically irrational development of urban areas in flood-prone regions, and laxity in enforcing the existing regulations designed precisely to prevent such development.

The Padshahi Bagh spill channel offers a concrete illustration of how infrastructure designed to manage floodwater has itself degraded over time. Designed to carry 17,000 cusecs of excess flow away from populated areas, the channel now handles only around 6,000 cusecs due to accumulated siltation and debris, according to a CAG audit, a loss of roughly two-thirds of its intended capacity achieved through years of neglect rather than any single catastrophic event.

Where should the path towards progress lie right now? There is a dual strategy which experts have pointed out and which has been called for repeatedly but remains half-hearted in its implementation. It is that of improving the flood warnings systems and flood infrastructure, along with trying to deal with the issue of unplanned urbanization and floodplain encroachment, which is much harder. While the former is a question of engineering and funding, the latter involves dealing with politically well-connected forces which have made money by building on land not meant for construction in the first place. Such a task has turned out to be much harder than simply building a flood embankment or dredging a river channel. Until such confrontation is faced, people in Srinagar will most probably see every period of heavy monsoon rains as a cause of real concern.

mdmuslimbhat@gmail.com