As tourist numbers surge across Kashmir, the very houseboats that made Dal Lake world-famous are slowly disappearing. Once symbols of the Valley’s romance and hospitality, these ornate floating homes now struggle against mounting bans, official neglect, rising costs, and bureaucratic hurdles invisible to the millions who photograph them each year, reports Asrar Syeed
At 5 am on April 8, Fayaz Ahmed was stepping out for Fajr prayers when he heard water. It was entering their houseboat fast. Within minutes, HB Gulshan Rose, his family’s home on the Jhelum River, had partially sunk. His 80-year-old mother, Raja Begum, was inside.
“Had my son not been present, maybe I would have died that day,” Begum said. “I would not have been able to leave on my own.” For days after, she cooked meals on the riverside pavement in Raj Bagh, her family’s belongings piled on the road. Neighbours offered shelter at night. But she did not know for how long. Her houseboat needed repairs. The permission to fix it had not come yet.
Fayaz, meanwhile, picked through the inside of the boat, looking for belongings that the river water had not reached. The windows were broken. The walls cracked. The paint long faded. Gulshan Rose had needed work for years. The application was in the system. The system had not moved.
This is the quiet crisis behind Kashmir’s loudest tourism boom. Visitors pour in. Shikara rides are sold. Dal Lake gleams in photographs. But behind the postcard row of houseboats, boats are sinking, families are in debt, and a 130-year-old institution is disappearing without a headline.
A British Intervention
The houseboat was never Kashmiri by origin. It was an accident of empire. Under Maharaja Ranbir Singh (1857-85), foreign travellers were barred from buying land or building homes. They could only hold permits for temporary stays.
Necessity produced invention. Kashmir already had Donga boats in which fishermen were living. A British traveller, MT Kenard upgraded it and introduced the first houseboat on Kashmir waterways somewhere in 1880. In his book Kashmir, British cavalry officer, Francis Younghusband, recorded in 1909 that some Europeans were living aboard nearly the whole year round. He put the rent at Rs 70 to Rs 100 per month. “The Kashmiri is an intelligent and clever carpenter,” he wrote.
Kashmiris built boats from Deodar wood, a timber prized for its resistance to water, rot, and insects, with pine used for the upper portions. Interiors were carved with the care of heritage craftsmen. Entire families learned the trade. The waterways of Dal Lake, Nigeen Lake, and the Jhelum River became their address, their livelihood, their identity. There were multi-story Houseboats in Jhelum till early 1980s.
Families Remember
Bashir Ahmed is one such family. His grandfather started the business. His father continued it. Then it passed to him. “Travellers who used to visit the valley all the way from America, Russia, England and New Zealand used to live in these houseboats,” he said. “Later, they used to hire shikaras for taking a tour of the lake, they used to shop from the nearby shops. All this contributed towards the people’s livelihood.” He calls those years the Golden Days. He speaks of them the way you speak of something you know is not coming back.
By the turn of the millennium, the number of houseboats had swelled to 3000. Then came the ban. Rising pollution levels prompted the administration to stop new houseboats from being built on the waterways. In 2009, the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir took legal custody of the lake. All license renewals and new construction were halted. Houseboat owners entered what Bashir Ahmad called “a phase of darkness.”
Aijaz Ahmad, Bashir’s cousin, spent his entire childhood on the family houseboat. He has watched both the good years and what he calls the most difficult phase of their lives. He pushed back hard on the reasoning behind the ban. Hotels whose sewage pipes land directly into Dal were never targeted, he alleged. The government owned Centaur lake View Hotel was never demolished. “The government imposed this ban by labelling houseboats as the major source of pollution,” he said. “But what about them?”
The Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s recent report documented what followed the ban: between 2007 and 2020, open water and submerged vegetation in Dal declined, while floating vegetation and built-up areas expanded. Sewage treatment plants malfunctioned. Administrative failures compounded each other. A study in the journal Agro Environmental Sustainability, analysing Dal and Nigeen from December 2021 to May 2022, found the dominant pollution source was untreated waste dumped from industrial and residential areas, not houseboats alone.
The Repair Trap
The outright ban was eventually lifted in phases by the judiciary. But what replaced it may be harder to live with. Houseboat owners must now apply for individual repair permissions through a multi-window government process. Forms go in. Months pass. The boats keep deteriorating.
“Right now there is no ban on repairs of houseboats but the government has laid out a process through which you have to apply for a permission,” Fayaz Ahmed said. “That process is lengthy and time consuming. Many people have over the last three years applied for permission but only a few have been given the permissions.” His own boat, HB Gulshan Rose, was among those still waiting when it sank on the morning of April 8.
Manzoor Ahmad Pakhtoon, Chairman of the Kashmir Houseboat Association, confirmed the numbers. In two years, only 30 to 35 permissions were issued against many more applications. “It takes months to acquire one,” he said. “During that time their houseboats continue to deteriorate and the damages keep on increasing.” His solution is straightforward: make the process single-window: one application, one authority, and one timeline. It has not happened.
Surging Costs
While repairs stall, costs have surged. A houseboat requires 4000 to 5000 sq ft of A-class Deodar for construction. That wood now costs between Rs 5,000 to Rs 7000 per sft. A full repair runs well above Rs10 lakh. Most houseboat owners do not earn more than a lakh a year.
“If you visit Dal-Lake, Nigeen Lake or Chinar Bagh you can observe many houseboats require repairment’s,” Pakhtoon informed. “But how do you expect a houseboat owner who has not been able to make more than a lakh per year to make repairs worth more than a million?” He argued the government should draw a policy offering subsidised or low-interest loans to houseboat owners. No such policy exists.
During the years when earnings were strong, the cycle was self-sustaining. “A houseboat owner easily made the yearly required repairs because the earnings were good,” said Abdul Rashid Karnai, whose family has been in the business for generations. “Foreign tourists sometimes used to book a room for more than three to four weeks, allowing the owner to make a decent earning.” That income covered the wood, the craftsmen, the annual upkeep. Once earnings fell, maintenance was deferred. Deferred maintenance meant deterioration. Deterioration drove away tourists. The spiral has no floor.
In the interior of Dal Lake, behind the well-photographed front row, sits HB Michael Jackson, submerged for nearly a year. It is surrounded by algae, plastic bottles, and polyethene.
Shabir Karnai said the polluted water and miserable conditions make living nearby difficult. His father Abdul Rashid spends his days pointing at it. “My family has been into this business for generations. By the grace of the Almighty and hard work, we used to make good money. Hundreds of tourists have spent their days on this very boat that has now become a piece of liability rather than a source of livelihood.”
A Tourism Boom
Kashmir’s tourism numbers have recovered sharply in recent years. Hotels are full. New restaurants open each season. Gulmarg and Pahalgam draw weekenders by the thousands. The valley has never been more photographed or more discussed. Yet for houseboat families, the boom has brought little relief.
The tourists arriving now are different from the ones who sustained this trade for a century. Foreign visitors, whose long stays generated the steady earnings that paid for annual maintenance, have largely stopped staying in houseboats. What they find when they look is not encouraging – broken windows, cracked walls, faded paint. “It portrays a very bad image,” Fayaz said. The deterioration drives away the very guests whose money would fund repair.
On the Jhelum River, the collapse is further along. Raja Begum has lived her entire life on the riverbanks. She remembers when both banks were lined with houseboats, full, earning, and alive. “The earnings were sufficient for them to feed their families and fulfil their dreams,” she recalled. Now most of those houseboats have disappeared. The ones that remain need urgent attention. She knows this better than most. Her own home went under on an April morning.
Adil Yusuf carries the weight of what comes next. His father handed him the business expecting continuity. Instead, Adil has accumulated debt trying to manage household expenses as earnings have fallen or disappeared altogether. “I am not very educated, making it difficult for me to find a job,” he said. He is not unusual. Younger members of houseboat families across Dal and Jhelum have already left the trade. The ones who remain do so out of inheritance and the absence of options, not optimism.
What Remains
Manzoor Pakhtoon put it plainly: if current conditions continue, houseboats may disappear permanently. “The families of houseboat owners are suffering,” he asserted. His is seeking a rehabilitation plan, one that addresses the permit backlog, offers financial support, and builds a single-window system.
The association has made this case. It has been heard. It has not yet been answered with policy.
For Raja Begum, still cooking on the RajBagh pavement days after HB Gulshan Rose went under, the scale of the debate is too large to hold. She has a simpler problem. “I have been cooking here for the last several days. I have nowhere to go. The neighbours have been kind enough to offer us help during these needful times and we sleep in their house, but for how long will this continue?” She said it wondering when she would be able to live again inside her houseboat. That is where her heart is. That is where she wishes to leave this world.
