Flood alarm again
The Jhelum is again roaring and this roar is repeated too often now. Last year during the month of September the calm with which Jhelum and other rivers were flowing was broken when the weather turned erratic and a flood threat loomed over Srinagar and other districts.
This time around the Jhelum again reached the flood alarm level at Sangam in south Kashmir and RamMunshibagh in Srinagar. The rains had already created ripples as many areas like Bemina, Rajbagh, Mehjoor Nagar, Nowgam, Hyderpora and parts of Downtown were under water storm water. However, that is another part of the story.
Right now south Kashmir’s paddy fields have turned into lakes. Roads became canals. The reason residents give is simple and weary: Every time it rains for a few hours, our lane turns into a pond. That sentence captures Kashmir’s evolving flood crisis.
Twelve years after the devastation of September 2014, we have strengthened the river. We have not yet fixed the city. From river floods to rain floodsPost-2014, the focus was rightly on the Jhelum.
Dredging, stronger embankments, upgraded pumping stations, and talk of reviving spill channels improved the river’s carrying capacity. Those investments show today. The river system is under surveillance and, so far, holding. But floods are no longer just a river problem.
The new threat is from the sky and from the ground beneath our feet. Short, intense cloudbursts, a pattern scientist’s link to a warming Himalaya, dump huge volumes of water in hours. Our drainage cannot take it. Blocked channels, shrunken wetlands, and unplanned urban sprawl do the rest.
Hokersar, Wular, Hygam, Anchar — wetlands that once absorbed excess rain — continue to shrink under encroachment and pollution. Each acre lost is an acre of flood storage gone. At the same time, rapid construction has covered natural drainage paths with concrete. When water has nowhere to go, it comes into our homes.
Ironically, big mitigation projects get announced. Basic desilting and maintenance do not. A region’s flood resilience is not measured only by embankment height. It is measured by whether a child can get to school after two hours of rain. By whether an ambulance can reach SMHS or SKIMS hospital on time. And will the shops in old city open the next morning. On those counts, we are still failing.
However, one must not sign pessimistic. There are steps that can still get us out of this vicious cycle where the sword keeps hanging on us whenever it rains in Srinagar or elsewhere.
An immediate scientific desilting of all storm-water channels before every monsoon needs to be made a routine feature. The GIS mapping of Srinagar’s and other towns drainage needs to be done so that blockages are found before rain, not after. There should be separate storm-water and sewage lines and this need to be followed in all major cities and towns.
Finally, wetlands need to be treated as flood infrastructure, not wasteland. A strict enforcement of eviction drive, stopping further filling, and funding of de-weeding and revival of Hokersar, Anchar and others basins needs to be initiated immediately.
What we need to understand is that climate change guarantees more high-intensity rain spells. If our response remains stuck at ‘river level is safe’ we will keep being surprised by water in our lanes, roads and streets.
The 2014 floods taught us about a river breaching its banks. The rains of 2025 and 2026 are teaching us about a city breaching its capacity. Both lessons demand action. Kashmir has done the hard part of taming the Jhelum. Now we must do the harder, less visible part: unclog drains, save wetlands, and plan our cities for water. Until then, every moderate rainfall will continue to remind us that flood preparedness is not just about how high the river rises, but about how well the city drains.
