Opinion | The Shikara Trade Livelihoods Floating on Dal Lake

At some ghats along Dal Lake, where fifty or sixty shikaras once queued for tourists eager for a sunset ride past the floating gardens, only a single boat now goes out each day, often carrying a local passenger rather than a visitor. “Earlier, one shikara used to go out five or six times with passengers, but now there are sixty to seventy shikaras, out of which only five to ten go out, and even that with great difficulty,” one boatman told a reporter documenting the crisis in late 2025. His account, echoed by dozens of others working the lake, describes an income collapse severe enough to upend a trade that has passed through Kashmiri families for generations.

The shikara is not, at its core, a tourist accessory. Long before Instagram-worthy photographs of colourful boats drifting across still water became shorthand for Kashmir tourism, shikaras served as the primary mode of transport, trade and daily life for communities living on and around Dal Lake. Every morning, they carry fresh vegetables, flowers, fish and firewood from the lake’s famous floating gardens to the markets of Srinagar, a functional role that predates and, in principle, will outlast the tourism industry that has since layered itself on top of this daily commerce. Thousands of families live on houseboats and in villages around the lake’s banks, and their entire income structure, from boat operation to vegetable trading to houseboat hospitality, depends on the lake’s continued economic vitality.

That vitality has been repeatedly tested, and the shikara community’s own history offers a useful record of just how frequently. many events produced thier own tourism collapse, and each time, shikara owners absorbed the loss by selling boats, switching to daily labour, or shifting into selling vegetables and fruit just to keep their families afloat. At the lowest point recorded after the 2019 advisory, only 400 of the roughly 4,500 registered shikaras on Dal and the neighbouring Nigeen Lake were still operating, and those that did run offered rides at a 50 percent discount simply to attract what little demand remained.

The most recent and, by several accounts, most severe blow came after a terror attack in Pahalgam in April 2025, which triggered what local tourism stakeholders describe as a roughly 95 percent decline in visitor numbers. Where up to 200 to 300 shikaras would once ply the lake throughout a single day during peak season, only two or three boats were seen leaving the shore in the aftermath. The financial numbers behind that collapse are stark: shikara owners who once earned between Rs 80,000 and Rs 100,000 in a good stretch, or at minimum around Rs 30,000, found themselves struggling to make even a hundred rupees on many days. Of the roughly 850 houseboats spread across Dal Lake, Nigeen Lake, Chinar Bagh and the Jhelum river, nine out of every ten were typically filled with tourists in normal seasons. In the aftermath of the 2025 attack, they sat largely empty, reduced, in the words of one account, to wooden shells drifting silently on the water.

The ripple effects extend well beyond the boat owners themselves. Houseboats that once employed four staff members now retain only two, with even those positions uncertain given the sustained downturn. Many boat and houseboat owners who had taken bank loans to invest in their vessels now find themselves struggling to keep up with loan repayments, adding a financial precarity layer on top of the immediate loss of daily income. One boatman described the emotional weight of this shift in stark personal terms, recalling that his father and his father before him had rowed shikaras on the Dal, and that he never imagined he would end up selling vegetables simply to get by, his voice reportedly trembling as he said it.

Amid this recurring pattern of collapse and partial recovery, there are signs of both institutional response and quiet adaptation. Traditional boat-building continues in workshops around areas like Takiya Dud, where craftsmen construct shikaras using deodar cedar wood, maintaining a specific craft skill alongside the boat operation trade itself. In December 2024, before the most recent downturn, a partnership launched Uber Shikara, an initiative aimed at integrating shikara bookings into modern ride-hailing technology, intended to increase demand and provide boat owners with more predictable income streams less dependent on the informal, walk-up tourist trade that has proven so vulnerable to sudden shocks. Conservation efforts around the lake itself, including annual removal of roughly 70,000 tonnes of weeds and waste, about 190 tonnes daily, alongside sewage treatment infrastructure, aim to preserve the ecological health of the waterway that the entire shikara economy ultimately depends on, a concern that connects directly to the broader crisis facing Dal Lake’s water quality and shrinking open water area documented elsewhere.

What the shikara trade’s repeated cycles of collapse and recovery reveal most clearly is the structural fragility built into any economy this heavily concentrated in tourism, and this exposed to security-related shocks entirely outside the control of the people whose livelihoods depend on it. A shikara owner cannot diversify his income the way a larger business might, and the informal, largely undocumented nature of the trade means that boatmen typically have little access to insurance, credit or government relief schemes when a sudden attack or political event brings tourist arrivals to a near halt. Each recovery has, so far, eventually arrived, tourists have returned after previous downturns, and shikaras have gone back out onto the water. Whether the current downturn follows that same pattern, or whether repeated shocks have finally pushed too many boatmen permanently into other trades, remains an open question that the shikara community itself, more than anyone, is anxiously watching unfold.

mdmuslimbhat@gmail.com