“We are beautifying the wound”: Wular Lake, restoration, and the people of Kashmir

The road to Bandipora district in north Kashmir near the Wular Lake, curls through the mountains like a quiet river. The autumn air carries the faint smell of woodsmoke, and the trees along the roadside are tinged with yellow and red, colours of Harud, Kashmir’s fall.

At first glance, what appears to be a vast meadow glistening under the pale sun turns out to be something else. The green expanse hides water beneath; this is Wular Lake, once Asia’s largest freshwater lake, now half buried under floating vegetation, agricultural plots, and rows of willow trees planted decades ago.

At a wooden platform called the Wular Vantage Point, the view is deceptive. The wind stirs, the reeds bend, and for a moment it looks as if the lake still breathes. But what appears to be open water is often only marsh. “People come here and ask, ‘Where is the lake? Wular chu laachaar gomut”, Wular has become helpless’” says Umer Shafi Reshi (name changed) 27 years old, a local fisherman from Lankreshipora, one of thirty-two villages that still depend on Wular for survival. “I tell them, you are standing on it.” He laughs, then looks down at his feet, where cracked soil curls like scales.

The Wular Lake sits in Bandipora district, ringed by the snow-lined peaks of Harmukh. It was once the valley’s natural flood basin and lifeline, storing water from the Jhelum River, recharging aquifers, and supporting thousands of families who lived by its shores.

In 1990, Wular was declared a Ramsar wetland of international importance, a global recognition that now reads like a warning more than bestowed honour.

Wular once spanned over 217 square kilometers (84 square miles), including nearly 58 square kilometers of marshland, stretching between the Baramulla and Bandipora districts in north Kashmir. Today, it has shrunk to around 80 square kilometers, with less than 30 square kilometers of open water remaining. The rest has hardened into farmland or stands of willow planted decades ago for timber. The loss has not been sudden but slow, a century-long collapse, measured in meters of depth and generations of memory.

Before dawn, Umer rows out alone. The fog is so thick it erases the horizon. The only sound is the slow dip of the oar through weeds. He rows for almost an hour before finding water deep enough to cast his net. By the time the sun lifts, the mist has cleared to reveal flat gray water littered with floating plastic and the pale roots of lotus plants. His catch today weighs three kilos, mostly carp, worth about nine hundred rupees at the market. After buying diesel and food, he will keep less than two hundred. “Some days we catch nothing,” he says. “But if I stay home, there’s no dinner.”

Umer left school at twelve when his father fell ill. Fishing is all he knows. He still remembers his father telling him how the lake once gleamed blue at sunrise, how boats sailed from Bandipora to Sopore without touching silt. Now, halfway across, the oar hits mud. “We catch more plastic than fish,” he says, pulling a tangle of weeds wrapped around a shoe sole.

A Wetlands International study shows that Wular’s total fish catch has dropped from 10,544 tons to just 1,476 tons a year. With the population around the lake tripling, the per capita catch has fallen twentyfold. A study by the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology found that the average catch per hour, known as “catch per unit effort”, has collapsed to just 237 grams, down from several kilos two decades ago. “It’s an ecological collapse,” says Dr. Feroz Ahmad Bhat, a fisheries scientist at the university. “The lake is overloaded with nutrients, oxygen-starved, and chemically stressed. It’s eutrophic, overfed to death.”

“The money I earn now doesn’t even meet our basic needs,” says Wahab Mohammad Dar from Sarakoot village. “Earlier a fisherman could catch 15 to 20 kilos of fish in a day. Now it’s five.”

Umer doesn’t use words like eutrophic. He only knows that when he drops his net, he finds garbage. “The water used to have the smell of life,” he says. “Now it smells like drain.”

At sunrise, the women of Lankreshipora push their boats into the shallows. Among them is 42-year-old Nayeema Begum. Her boat is heavy with reeds, locally known as aabgasse. She rows quietly through the weed-choked surface, slicing stalks with a small sickle. The work is slow, the pay smaller, about four hundred rupees a day, but it keeps her family afloat through the winter.

When we met her, Nayeema was hesitant to speak on camera. Like many women in the village, she worried about how her photograph might be received in the community. “People talk,” she said softly, glancing away as we lowered the lens. So we talked instead, about the lake, her work, and the quiet rhythm of her days on the water.

Her hands are rough, the skin cut by sharp stems. She has been doing this since she was a girl, long before there were machines or conservation plans. During winter, she dries the weeds for cattle fodder. The lake provides everything she owns, food, fuel, and faith. “This lake is like our field,” she says. “But now the field is dying.”

As Nayeema rows back toward shore, she stops to look at the pink lotus flowers floating near her boat. They vanished thirty years ago after the 1992 floods buried their seeds under silt. Only recently have they returned. “It feels like the lake is alive again,” she says. “But for how long?”

They dredge the mud and cut the willows

A few miles east of the village, the sound of engines drowns out the birds. At a dredging site, excavators claw through black mud under a pale morning sky. A forest department employee notices us watching and walks over. He introduces himself as Reyaz (name changed)  and begins speaking, his eyes fixed on the machines. He works with the Jammu and Kashmir Forest Department and the Wular Conservation and Management Authority, the agency formed in 2012 to restore the lake.

“We’ve removed more than one hundred twenty thousand willow trees and reclaimed over four square kilometers of open water,” Reyaz says, glancing toward the machines. “The lake is breathing again, but it’s a slow recovery. For every patch we clear, new waste and silt return with the rain.” Behind him, trucks climb the embankment, their wheels caked in sludge, hauling the lake’s past out one load at a time.

In the 1980s, the government planted millions of willow trees around Wular to supply timber and firewood. The trees grew fast and multiplied across the lakebed, trapping silt and choking channels. Today, they cover nearly twenty-seven square kilometers of what was once water. Their roots drink the lake. Their shade blocks the reeds.

Officials say the revival is the result of large-scale desilting by the Wular Conservation and Management Authority (WUCMA). Using cutter-suction dredgers, the agency has removed nearly 80 lakh cubic metres of silt, restoring about five square kilometres of lake area. “The lotus came back on its own once sunlight reached the bed again,” says Mudasir Ahmad, WUCMA’s zonal officer. “It’s a sign that the ecosystem is healing.”

“The willows were meant to help people,” says Dr. M.R.D. Kundangar, a retired hydrologist who has studied Kashmir’s wetlands for decades. “Instead, they strangled the lake.” Yet cutting them poses its own problem: those same willows feed Kashmir’s cricket-bat factories, an industry employing more than ten thousand people. “Cut the trees and you lose income,” Kundangar says. “Keep them and you lose the lake. Either way, you’re choosing what dies first.”

Reyaz understands the dilemma. “We’re trying to balance both,” he says. “It’s not perfect, but at least the lake is breathing again.” He points toward the open water, where a cluster of birds circles in the distance. The Asian Waterbird Census of 2025 recorded more than three hundred thousand migratory birds in Wular, a fourfold increase from the previous year. Among them was the Smew, a small northern duck unseen here for eighty years. “That’s proof our work matters,” Reyaz says. “Birds don’t come to dead water.”

Still, he admits the limitations. “We dredge here, and the next flood brings more silt,” he says. “Upstream deforestation continues, and Srinagar’s sewage still flows in. We are cleaning one end while pollution pours from the other.”

Since 2012, the Wular Conservation and Management Authority (WUCMA) has spent hundreds of crores on dredging and removing the willows that choke the lake. Officials say more than 79 lakh cubic meters of silt have been cleared so far. Yet only a fraction of the 17-square-mile lake has been revived. 

Wular’s decay is a story written in slow motion. The Jhelum River, which supplies eighty-eight percent of the lake’s water, now delivers waste instead of lifeblood. Srinagar’s untreated sewage, roughly seventy million liters a day, flows directly into the river. Fertilizers and pesticides from rice fields and orchards add chemicals that bloom into algae and choke the oxygen.

Researchers say nearly 57 percent of the lake had already become eutrophic by 2018, choked with algae and weeds triggered by untreated sewage and fertilizer runoff. Heavy siltation from deforestation and urban sprawl has further crippled its ability to hold water.

“The lake has become the valley’s sink,” says Professor Shakil Romshoo, Vice Chancellor of the Islamic University of Science and Technology. “Every year, more silt, more toxins, less water.” Satellite data from the Indian Space Research Organization shows that between 2008 and 2019, Wular’s open water area shrank by twenty-three percent. “We’re losing storage capacity,” Romshoo says. “When floods come, the city pays the price.” During the catastrophic floods of 2014, Srinagar’s streets turned to rivers. “Wular used to absorb that overflow,” he says. “We destroyed the sponge that protected us.”

For Gani Bhat, an 87-year-old local from Sarakoot village beside Wular, the story of Wular is more than just data, it’s memory. He grew up near the southern shore, where he learned to swim and fish. “When I was a boy, the water was blue,” he says. “Now it’s the color of smoke.”

Gani says the problem isn’t just nature, it’s neglect. “You need ten permissions to pick up one plastic bottle,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s the only lake in India guarded by the navy.” He pauses for a moment, looking toward the water. “You can’t save Wular without its people. Give them a stake, and they’ll protect it better than anyone.”

In the village of Sarakoot, 80-old Wahab Mohammad Dar bends from his boat to touch a lotus bloom. “I thought we lost this forever,” he says. The lotus stems, known locally as nadru, disappeared for three decades after the floods buried their seeds under silt. When WUCMA’s dredging began, the old seeds found light again. Their return has changed lives. Each kilo sells for around one hundred twenty rupees, and during winter, when fishing slows, the harvest keeps families afloat. “It’s like God gave the lake a second breath,” Dar says.

Still, amid the decay, there are signs of resilience. In winter, the air over Wular fills with the wings of northern shovelers, gadwalls, mallards, pintails, species once thought gone from the valley. Ornithologists recorded more than two hundred species last season. “Birds are our most honest witnesses,” says Reyaz. “They only come when the ecosystem still has pulse.”

He believes the solution lies with the people who live around the lake. “You can’t save Wular without its community,” he says. “You have to give them a stake in it.”

At the same time, the government is pushing a new idea: ecotourism, boardwalks, bird-watching towers, boat rides. Officials say the plan will bring attention and jobs. But locals like Gani fear it will repeat Dal Lake’s fate, where beautification masked environmental ruin. “Tourism is not conservation,” says Gani. “Dal was polished for photos while dying underneath. Wular could go the same way.”

What remains when the water turns still 

Reyaz, the officer, disagrees gently. “If people see the lake, they’ll care about it,” he says. Then pauses. “We just need to make sure the care doesn’t destroy what’s left.”

The debate captures Kashmir’s larger paradox, a place of immense natural beauty that survives despite its politics. Wular lies inside a geography of both wonder and constraint, ringed by army posts, its waters watched over by commandos, its fate tied to competing bureaucracies. Even restoration needs clearance from half a dozen departments. “You need paperwork to breathe near this lake,” says Gani Bhat, shaking his head.

By afternoon, the light softens. Nayeema rows home, her boat heavy with reeds. Umer sits by his father’s old hut, mending a torn net.  Children play cricket on a dry patch that was once open lake. The ball rolls across cracked mud. A heron lifts off and disappears into the haze.

“The summers are hotter now,” Umer says. “The water gets lower every year. Sometimes we find dead fish floating. Maybe from chemicals, maybe from heat.” He doesn’t know. “All I know is that my father’s lake is gone.”

The words sound polished, practiced. But outside, trucks carrying dredged mud leave fresh scars on the banks. When it rains, the silt slips back into the water. “You can’t fight the lake with paperwork,” says Gani Bhat, watching the trucks pass. “It needs time and respect, not just money.”

By early evening, the wind drops. The surface of the lake turns glassy, catching the fading pink of Harmukh’s snow peaks. Fishermen drag their boats ashore. The air smells faintly of diesel and algae. Smoke rises from mud houses along the bank.

Wular’s future hinges on whether restoration moves beyond appearances to address pollution, silt, and governance upstream. Dredging may reopen water, but without community participation and catchment repair, recovery remains fragile. The lake is not just being restored; it is being tested by policy choices, patience, and whether care can outlast cosmetic fixes.