Pollution Becomes Penalty

Years of neglect and mismanagement have turned pollution into a bill that citizens must pay.

- Dr. Raja Muzaffar Bhat

I have seen what determined leadership can do to a city.

Last year, Lucknow moved from rank 41 to rank three in India's cleanest cities list, and that change did not happen by chance.

When Indrajeet Singh took charge as commissioner of the Lucknow Municipal Corporation, he faced a dumping site at Ghaila holding lakhs of tonnes of waste. At the time, many believed the task was too large to handle.

But Singh pushed ahead anyway, and today that landfill has turned into a real estate hotspot, with property prices rising sharply since 2020.

That transformation shows what happens when an officer gets authority, backing, and accountability.

I often return to this example when I look at Jammu and Kashmir, where cities and towns continue to drown in garbage. Officers who want to act rarely get the freedom to do so, and the consequences show up everywhere.

Waste gets dumped without planning, water sources face contamination, and urban local bodies end up facing heavy penalties from the National Green Tribunal.

When they fail to pay those penalties, public buildings and assets go under the hammer.

What is unfolding in Poonch captures this collapse in the clearest possible way.

The Municipal Council of Poonch has dumped municipal solid waste near the Poonch river for more than 20 years. The dumping site lies close to the Sher-e-Kashmir bridge, and over the past five or six years the waste has entered the river itself.

This same river supplies drinking water to people living on both sides of the Line of Control. The danger here cannot be brushed aside as a technical lapse or paperwork delay.

My engagement with this issue began in 2017, when I started visiting Poonch regularly and raising concerns with the district administration.