After repairing his house on the bank of Dal Lake recently, Nazir Ahmed (52) moved into it with his family. The Kashmiri houseboat owner is now eager to rebuild his life — left battered by last year’s devastating floods in the Valley. But biting winds and icy weather are a big hindrance.

As the ‘paradise on earth’ experiences Chillai-Kalan — a 40-day period of harshest winter when the minimum temperature hovers below the freezing point — the houseboats remain shrouded in icy silence. Already hit by the drastic decline in tourist inflow after the flood — the worst in nearly a century — the boatmen are enduring an extended period of joblessness as they await the end of this bitter winter.

“Even natural disasters hit the poorest the hardest,” says Ahmed, smoking a hukkah on his shikaara (houseboat), named Dil Nay Phir Yaad Kiya after a Hindi movie. Like him, scores of other shikaara rowers are found idling near their colourful boats at Ghat 16 of the lake.

“Had it not been for us boatmen, many more lives would have been lost here,” says Ahmed, recounting the rescue work the boatmen undertook during the deluge. I hire his services to go across the lake to A-Bhatpora, which is home for the boatmen community. Here the narrow streets are lined with mud and concrete structures with tin roofs, many of which still show signs of the destruction wreaked by the floods.

Winters have traditionally been harsher for the boatmen as very few tourists arrive during this period. Summer is when their business thrives, provided the Valley is peaceful and there are fewer protests or incidents of stone pelting. “Last year, during the tourist season, floods robbed us of livelihood. We could not earn or save anything. Never before was our life so hard as it is this winter,” says Ghulam Ahmed Bhat (44), who lives with his six sisters in a small, dingy cellar-like mud house. “The compensation amount I received from the government was not enough. I had to repair my house with a bank loan.”

A few other boatmen join in the conversation. “Though we have been getting food rations as relief from the government, the compensation amount for repair and rebuilding houses is too small and is based on arbitrary surveys,” says one of them. “During the deluge, our boats were damaged but we have not received any compensation for that as yet.”

The drop in regular earnings has added to their woes. “Last year, a lot of tourists came to Kashmir until the floods swamped the Valley. On average we were earning ₹500 to ₹1,000 per day,” says Manzoor Ahmed Bhat (50), adding, “now, however, a boatman hardly earns ₹100 on an odd day.”

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India estimates that revenues in Kashmir’s tourism industry — its largest employment generator — have fallen by nearly 55 per cent after the floods. Notably, the Union Ministry of Tourism had announced a ₹100-crore special grant for reviving the tourism sector and asked the State to submit a detailed project report. That report has not been submitted yet.

Though Chillai-Kalan ends today, the Valley will continue to experience winter for a few more weeks. “After the floods, the government had sounded an alert over fears of infection, as a result of which tourists stopped coming to the Valley. That was followed by the hullaballoo of Assembly elections. Our concerns got sidelined,” says Nazir Ahmed, even as he hopes that this winter of despair quickly turns into a spring of hope.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in J&K

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