Last week, the Army embarked on a mission to clean Dal Lake and restore its pristine glory.
It is the Army versus the newly-elected Srinagar Mayor over 'Mission Save Dal Lake' in the Valley.
Seemingly irked by the Army's Dal Lake cleaning drive, Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) Mayor Junaid Azim Mattu took to Twitter and asked the Army not to venture into the domain of civil authorities
"With all due respect to the Army, I don't think the Army needs to venture into civil governance domains. Not the job of the Army. Taking peripheral weeds out with a backhoe loader parked on the pavement and dumping tons of weeds on the boulevard road isn't what we need!" Junaid tweeted.
This follows the Army's statement noting that the State Administration had approached them and requested to extend a helping hand in this mission, "to which the Army responded positively and undertook the pilot project".
"A joint task force of Army, Land and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA) and Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) is presently working towards this mission and is currently sharing the technical expertise and infrastructure available with them for the same," said an army spokesman.
The spokesman noted that Deputy Mayor of Srinagar Sheikh Imran, along with a delegation of 150 people, including SMC officials, corporators, social workers, LAWDA workers and shikara dwellers, visited the Sher-e-Kashmir International Convention Centre (SKICC) on December 22 and applauded the progress achieved by the joint team in cleaning Dal Lake.
Hours later, the Srinagar Mayor rebutted, saying they have not entered into any collaborative operation with the Army for any cleaning, de-weeding operations in Dal.
"All inter-agency collaborations require official authorisation and MoUs. There are misleading reports about the SMC having entered into collaboration for Dal de-weeding with the Army. There is NO such collaboration. Any reports to the contrary are factually incorrect," Junaid said.
Last week, the Army embarked on a mission to clean Dal Lake and restore its pristine glory.
Spread over an area of 25 sqkm, the lake comprises of floating gardens, built-up land masses with human settlements and houseboats. Divided into three basins — Hazratbal, Bod-Dal and Nigeen, the lake is the source of drinking water for a large chunk of the population.
Increasing habitation, lack of waste management, massive sewerage flow and increasing human pressure is silently killing the world-famous lake.
Over Rs 759 crore has been spent by different governments to save the Dal Lake since 2002, but the health of the water body continues to deteriorate.
"Last year, we launched a big drive and since then we have cleared 2 sqkm of Lake of Water Lily. We have still 4 km to clear. Around 1000 skilled labourers are engaged in the extraction of Water Lily. These labourers uproot the lily manually," said Tariq Hussain, assistant executive engineer, (de-weeding) at LAWDA. Plus, the LAWDA has removed 1.44 lakh cubic meter of weeds from the Dal Lake so far.
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