How a wetland became a forty-year emergency, and how a capital learned to live inside the smell of its own neglect.
There is a version of Srinagar that exists only in postcards and reels — shikaras gliding through lotus-flecked water, snow-capped peaks reflected in still lakes, the Boulevard lit gold at dusk. And then there is the Srinagar that its own residents wake up to: windows sealed shut through the summer, residents describing chronic respiratory problems, local borewell water viewed with suspicion, and a stench that some mornings hangs over neighbourhoods around the landfill.
Both of these are real. That is the problem.
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| Image Source | Umer Farooq Zargar for The Xylom |
This is not a story about one landfill. It is a story about what happens when J&K's summer capital spends four decades treating its waste problem as someone else's emergency — until the emergency stops staying where it was put, and starts arriving at everyone's doorstep. This is not a story about Srinagar becoming a slum in the conventional sense. It is about something quieter and, in its own way, more damning: a city producing waste faster than it can reliably manage it, and gradually treating the consequences as normal.
A Rice-Bowl, Buried
Before it was a wound, Achan was a wetland. Locals who remember it describe a landscape of paddy fields and lush vegetation, thick with migratory birds in winter — what one longtime resident recalls as Srinagar's own rice-bowl. Families cultivated the land at Saidapora for generations.
The paper trail on how that changed is not perfectly clean, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than papering over it. Journalists covering Achan have consistently reported, across nearly a decade of independent reporting, that then-Governor Jagmohan Malhotra ordered the wetland land-filled in 1983 to make way for a satellite colony — a proposal that was drafted and then abandoned, leaving the landfilling behind after the colony died. A separate, more administrative record — an official Srinagar Municipal Corporation account of the site's history — dates the formal transfer of state land to SMC for waste dumping to a government order issued on March 27, 1985, with open dumping beginning operationally in 1986. The two accounts are not necessarily in conflict — a 1983 decision, a 1985 land transfer, and 1986 operations could easily describe the same slow-moving bureaucratic sequence — but no single document that this piece could locate ties all three dates together, and readers should treat 1983 as well-attested journalism rather than an administratively documented fact.
What is not in dispute is the scale, even if the exact figures vary by what is being measured and, seemingly, by which official filing one reads. The SMC's report to the National Green Tribunal describes the broader Achan dumpsite as spread over 123 acres, while the PLOS ONE study describes the landfill area as approximately 75 acres. Other historical records describe the land originally transferred to SMC differently, and this piece has not been able to independently verify a single, reconciling figure for that transfer. A land transfer, a dumpsite boundary, and a study's sampling area are not necessarily the same thing, and this piece does not treat these figures as interchangeable.
Nobody asked what would happen when a city of over a million people started sending everything it discarded to one address.
What 550 Tonnes a Day Looks Like After Forty Years
Today, Achan receives somewhere between 450 and 600 tonnes of municipal solid waste daily, depending on whose figure and which year you cite — Chief Minister Omar Abdullah told the J&K Legislative Assembly on March 10, 2025, responding to a question from MLA Mubarak Gul, that the facility handles approximately 550 tonnes per day. Whatever the precise number, the scale of the daily inflow is clear: hundreds of tonnes of municipal waste continue to arrive at the site each day. Over four decades, that daily accumulation has compounded into over 11 lakh metric tonnes of accumulated legacy waste, per the SMC's own compliance reporting to the National Green Tribunal.
Only a fraction of that has ever been cleared. By mid-2026, roughly 40,000 metric tonnes had been processed through bio-mining — the process of excavating and sorting legacy waste for recyclables, inert material, and compost, per the SMC's compliance material. That is under four percent of the total. The SMC's own action plan had called for the site's Material Recovery Facility to expand from 100 to 250 tonnes of daily processing capacity, but subsequent tribunal proceedings continued to question whether that promised capacity had actually been demonstrated.
This is not a site straining under sudden pressure. It is a site whose management has been failing for longer than many of the children now growing up next to it have been alive.
The Health Question Nobody Has Fully Answered
In July 2025, the Group of Concerned Citizens — a local advocacy body that includes Dr Fiaz Maqbool Fazili, a surgeon and healthcare policy analyst — submitted a formal representation to the J&K Legislative Assembly's House Committee on Environment. Drawing on more than two dozen research papers and expert reports, the submission stated that methane levels at Achan measured nearly 14 percent of the gases present at the landfill, and that hydrogen sulfide levels exceeded 20 parts per million — a level the submission itself described as double the relevant danger threshold. In the same representation, Dr Fazili is reported as saying that forty percent of respiratory and gastrointestinal cases at SMHS Hospital originate in the neighbourhoods surrounding Achan.
Those figures deserve to be read for what they are: a synthesis assembled by an advocacy group for a legislative committee, not an independent measurement this publication has traced to its original instrument or source paper. They are second-hand as reported here, and a reader should weigh them accordingly. Separately, reporting from Srinagar hospitals has cited physicians, including Dr Nisar-ul-Hassan, describing increased respiratory and other illnesses among patients from neighbourhoods around Achan. Those observations are consistent with the broader concerns documented in the environmental literature, but they are not, in the sourcing available here, tied to a single audited hospital dataset establishing causation.
A year-long study by researchers Shayesta Islam, Haleema Bano, Asif Aziz Malik, and Fahad Alotaibi, of SKUAST Kashmir and King Saud University, published in PLOS ONE on November 19, 2024 ("Landfill leachate: An invisible threat to soil quality of temperate Himalayas," DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0314006), sampled soil around the landfill across all four seasons and four site categories. The study compared cadmium concentrations with a stated permissible limit of 0.8 mg/kg and reported concentrations ranging from 0.06 to 5.89 mg/kg, with the highest values occurring at the landfill sampling locations — more than seven times the limit at the top of that range. The study's summer mean across sampling locations was 4.46 mg/kg, while the mean concentration at the centre site across all seasons was 4.56 mg/kg — both well above the stated limit. Lead ranged up to a peak of 98.3 mg/kg against an 85 mg/kg limit, with the centre site's mean reaching 85.02 mg/kg across seasons — against a mean of just 5.90 mg/kg at the study's own control site, underscoring that the contamination is strongly concentrated at the landfill sampling sites rather than reflecting general background levels. Nickel was reported at up to 42.10 mg/kg against a 35 mg/kg limit. The study also raised concerns about inadequate landfill lining and the risk of leachate affecting surrounding soil and groundwater. The study demonstrates soil-quality contamination around the site; it does not, by itself, establish that these measured concentrations have caused specific diseases in nearby residents.
Roughly 250 households live close enough to call Achan their literal backyard, according to local reporting. Over time, a site originally chosen for waste disposal became surrounded by permanent residential settlement. That illustrates a familiar mechanism of environmental inequality: hazardous land becomes cheaper, cheaper land attracts households with fewer alternatives, and the hazard becomes entrenched because the people living beside it have the least leverage to make it disappear.
When the Land and Water Stop Being Trustworthy
The damage has not stayed underground. A local resident, Wahid Ahmad, told Down To Earth that unscientific dumping has damaged an estimated 600 to 800 acres of farmland, and that vegetables and milk from the area are turned away in the market over contamination fears, with water from local borewells and tubewells which he said had become unsafe. These are resident accounts rather than an independent agricultural survey this piece could locate, and are presented here as such — but they are specific, consistent with the surrounding contamination data, and came from a named source willing to put his account on record.
This is where the picture stops being only a public-health story and becomes an economic-abandonment story. A landfill doesn't just pose environmental and health risks to the people nearby. It can also undermine the value of surrounding land, cast doubt on locally produced food, and make future redevelopment increasingly difficult.
The Wetland That Was Supposed to Filter This — and Didn't
Achan does not sit in isolation. The National Green Tribunal has itself noted that a canal runs alongside the landfill and empties into Anchar Lake, which connects into the broader Dal Lake system — the same water that shikaras drift across in every tourism brochure Kashmir has ever printed. That hydrological connection makes the possibility of leachate moving beyond the site a serious environmental concern.
Nor is Achan the only water body the city's waste has touched. Khushal Sar, a lake in the old city that once physically connected Dal and Anchar, was for years described by residents of Zadibal as being at the brink of collapse, receiving household solid waste from surrounding parts of the old city with nowhere formal to send it — a description that dates mainly to the late 2010s. The more recent picture, as of early 2026, is more complicated and, in places, more hopeful: a community-led restoration effort has pulled Khushal Sar back from the edge in visible ways, with residents describing birds returning to water that had been a swamp of plastic and muck for a generation. The recovery is real, but it remains incomplete and vulnerable to continuing encroachment, landfilling, and urban pressure; the historic navigable connections between the city's wetlands, disrupted decades ago as the Mar Canal was filled in, remain only partly restored. It is a story of partial repair happening inside a still-unresolved crisis, not a closed case in either direction.
The Verdict Is Already In, and It Is Official
In the 2024–25 Swachh Survekshan — India's national cleanliness assessment — Srinagar ranked 32nd among India's 40 Million-Plus cities, with an overall score of 7,488 out of 12,500. Among those 40 cities, Srinagar ranked ninth from the bottom. This is not an activist's accusation. It is the Government of India's own assessment, delivered after years of public investment under programmes including the Smart Cities Mission and Swachh Bharat Mission. A city that markets itself globally on the strength of its natural beauty has been formally ranked, in this specific national cleanliness assessment, among the lowest-scoring cities in its population category.
The contrast is difficult to ignore: a city designated for modern urban infrastructure continues to operate a long-standing open dumping system — the city's principal, and for years effectively sole, dumping ground — at its edge.
Four Decades of Being Told to Wait
None of this is undocumented. What makes Achan a story of governance failure, and not merely environmental misfortune, is the sheer length and consistency of the paper trail showing that everyone in a position to act already knew.
Residents first approached the Jammu and Kashmir High Court over the landfill in 2006. According to contemporary reporting and subsequent accounts of the litigation, the court directed SMC to close the site or identify an alternative within eighteen months — a direction that was not complied with. In December 2017, SMC issued a Letter of Intent for a 500-plus-tonnes-per-day integrated waste-management facility at Achan involving energy generation and value recovery, with an eighteen-month implementation framework; the project did not become the functioning solution envisaged. Fresh NGT directions issued in both 2015 and 2017 remain, per activist Raja Muzaffar Bhat's own 2026 filings, largely unimplemented to this day.
The case that has produced the clearest paper trail, Raja Muzaffar Bhat versus Union of India and Others, reached a pivotal hearing on March 20, 2025, before a three-member NGT bench chaired by Justice Prakash Srivastava, alongside Justice Sudhir Aggarwal and Dr Senthil Vel. The Jammu and Kashmir Pollution Control Committee told the tribunal that the SMC had violated solid waste management norms for roughly 1,800 consecutive days, from April 1, 2020 to March 10, 2025 — and on that basis, applying the "Polluter Pays" principle, the tribunal imposed an environmental compensation of Rs 12.62 crore on the SMC. The same hearing also set in motion action under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 against eight former SMC commissioners — named in the JKPCC's submission to the tribunal — who held office between 2017 and 2025, while the then-serving commissioner, Dr Owais Ahmad, gave the tribunal a written undertaking to clear the entire legacy waste within two years.
In an earlier direction, in December 2024, the tribunal had ordered the SMC Commissioner to file a detailed, time-bound remediation plan; the SMC's affidavit promised a leachate treatment facility operational between January and June of 2025. Little of that happened on schedule, and the commissioner who made the promise was transferred out of the post in June 2025. By September 2025, the SMC was telling the tribunal the full legacy-waste clearance would be complete by March 2027. Its next compliance report, filed March 27, 2026, shifted that deadline to March 2028 and was not accompanied by an affidavit.
By late July 2026, the tribunal was still pressing on the pace and evidentiary basis of the cleanup. Questioned over the year-long slippage, SMC told the tribunal that its effluent treatment plant had been made functional, that leachate management had been integrated with bio-mining, that 3,200 trees had been planted around the site, and that a 125-tonne-per-day construction-and-demolition waste facility was nearing completion; the tribunal nonetheless directed the Commissioner to file a fresh, detailed affidavit accounting for exactly how much waste had been cleared since September 2025, how recovered material had been used, and the remaining gap between daily generation and daily treatment, with the matter listed for October 7, 2026. Days later, on August 1, 2026, Raja Muzaffar Bhat filed a rejoinder in the same case alleging the opposite on several points: that the leachate treatment plant was not, in fact, fully operational, that waste cells remained uncapped, that roughly 500 tonnes continued to be dumped daily, and that the SMC had not placed sufficient documentary evidence on record to substantiate its claims. SKIMS' own administration has, separately, placed on record before the tribunal that persistent foul odour from the landfill poses a potential health risk to critically ill patients. The dispute, in other words, is no longer simply whether promises have been made; it is whether the Corporation can demonstrate, with documentary and operational evidence, that those promises are producing results at the scale and speed the tribunal has ordered.
Read end to end, this is not a story of a city that didn't know. It is a story of a city that has been told, in writing, by its own courts and its own tribunal, repeatedly since 2006 — and has treated many of those deadlines as missed, delayed, or revised rather than met.
A New Number: Rs 361 Crore
In May 2026, the Jammu and Kashmir Council of Ministers, under Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, approved an Integrated Solid Waste Management project at Achan worth an estimated Rs 361 crore. The Cabinet's own language describes it as an 800-tonnes-per-day facility built around modern systems for collection, segregation, treatment and disposal; the more detailed configuration — a Refuse-Derived Fuel plant, a Compressed Bio-Gas facility, an expanded Material Recovery Facility, and a scientific landfill — appears in the SMC's separate compliance material filed with the NGT. By July 2026, the project had moved beyond cabinet approval and into procurement, with a Design-Build-Finance-Own-Operate-Transfer request for proposals issued for the 800-tonne facility. That tender, originally due to close on August 18, has since been extended to September 10, with bids set to open the following day — itself a small reminder that even the procurement stage has not moved to schedule. Whether it becomes an operational system, rather than another promised solution, remains the harder test. SMC has set a public target of eliminating open dumping at Achan and achieving full scientific waste management by 2027. The legacy-waste clearance deadline specifically, meanwhile, has already moved once, from March 2027 to March 2028.
It would be easy to end the story here, on a note of resolution. The evidence suggests caution is warranted instead. The city has announced major remediation plans before, including the 2017 waste-to-energy proposal, which did not deliver the promised solution.
What "Becoming a Dumpyard" Actually Means
Srinagar is not, today, a slum in the technical sense that word carries elsewhere in urban India — informal settlements sprawling across the city, housing stock collapsing en masse, municipal services entirely absent citywide. That claim would outrun what the evidence supports, and this publication does not deal in claims the evidence can't carry.
But something narrower and still deeply serious is true, and it is worth naming without euphemism: Srinagar has allowed a single, badly managed dumping ground to degrade local air quality, pose contamination risks to water and land, and threaten the lake system that is supposed to be the emblem of the entire Valley's identity — and it has done so for over forty years, through court orders, tribunal deadlines, and public promises, many of which were missed, delayed, or revised rather than kept. The city's national cleanliness ranking provides an official measure of the broader waste-management failure that residents near Achan have been describing for decades. That is not a metaphor. It is what "becoming a dumpyard" concretely means: a city where the mechanisms meant to prevent exactly this outcome have existed on paper for two decades and functioned, in practice, only intermittently.
That reckoning is not really about Achan alone. It is about what a city decides it is willing to tolerate happening to some of its own people, for how long, before it counts as an emergency for everyone — a question Srinagar already answered once, when a rice-bowl became a rubbish heap and the authorities ultimately allowed the dumping to become permanent.
The Rs 361-crore question now on the table is whether the city is finally willing to answer it differently.
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