Jammu and Kashmir’s latest floods expose both the fragility of its infrastructure and the state’s unlearnt lessons from 2014.
August 2025 has left Jammu and Kashmir reeling. Days of unrelenting rain turned valleys into torrents, villages into heaps of mud and stone, and fragile slopes into collapsing walls. Cloudbursts, landslides, and rivers surging beyond their banks claimed lives and destroyed homes. The images from these weeks felt like a grim replay of 2014, when floodwaters swallowed Srinagar and thousands were left stranded. Eleven years later, the wounds of that disaster appear to have taught little.
The government had promised that 2014 would be the last time Kashmiris would face such fury without preparedness. Master plans, dredging schedules, embankment reinforcements, and modern flood control systems were all spoken of. Yet an RTI reply this year revealed that not a single dredging project had been carried out on the Jhelum or its spill channels in the past five years. Bureaucratic files have moved, tenders have been floated, but on the ground, little has changed. The Comprehensive Flood Management Plan remains trapped in phases and paperwork, while the river that once sustained Kashmir is now allowed to choke under silt and encroachment.
The human cost of this neglect is devastating. Families in Pulwama, Kulgam, and Baramulla watched their fields, homes, and lives slip away in a matter of hours. The most vulnerable, the poor, the rural, the marginalised, bear the heaviest burden, while officialdom clings to explanations about “unprecedented rainfall” and “climate change”. There is no denying that extreme weather is intensifying, but the failure to invest in resilience is human, political, and deliberate.
What is most galling is the cycle of promises and amnesia. After every tragedy, committees are formed, surveys are conducted, and words like “comprehensive” and “long-term” are repeated. But when skies clear, urgency fades. Funds dry up. Priorities shift. Until the next disaster strikes, and once again, grief outpaces governance.
This editorial is not a lament against nature. It is a reminder that preparedness is possible and overdue. Countries with harsher geographies and heavier monsoons have tamed rivers, protected settlements, and built responsive systems. Jammu and Kashmir can too, if the state acknowledges that floods are not aberrations but inevitabilities.
Kashmiris cannot be condemned to live from one deluge to another. To allow memory of 2014 to be revived by every August downpour is a betrayal. The time for blueprints and half-measures is over. What is required is execution, accountability, and urgency. Otherwise, history will keep repeating itself, and each time the waters rise, they will wash away not only homes but trust in governance itself.
