Photo Essay: Fighting the Dal Fires
Jaspreet Kaur
Fire incidents in Srinagar’s famed Dal Lake are becoming rather frequent in the last few years. In one incident, last year, three Bangladeshi tourists lost their lives.
Kashmir’s beautiful houseboats are literally struggling to stay afloat. The number mber of houseboats has come down to 750 from 2000 in the last three decades, primarily due to a court-imposed ban on the construction of new houseboats, says the Houseboat Owners’ Association. Older houseboats are not getting repaired on time due to delays in official permissions. Timely procurement og cedar wood is also compounding the problem.
Need for a robust fire fighting infrastructure became imperative, and this spurred Tariq Ahmad Patloo, 51, owner of houseboat Sea Palace, to construct a fire-fighting boat. Patloo claims that an existing Fire and Emergency Services station in the Dal Lake would usually take time to reach during any fire exigency. This made him construct a fire-fighting boat for people’s service and rescue, costing him lakhs of rupees, he says.
Tariq Ahmad Patloo, had earlier converted his boat into a floating ambulance to ferry COVID-19 patients on the Dal Lake
Another factor encouraging Patloo to come up with a fire-fighting boat, which he had repaired after purchasing it from a scrap dealer, was the trust reposed by the Dal residents in him as he would always turn up for their help on a mere call. Although Patloo has brought relief to people with the construction of the fire-fighting boat, he knows that much more needs to be done. He wants to construct a pipe-less fire-fighting truck-like boat, which he says will be more convenient in containing fire.
Besides providing emergency services, Patloo alos speaks for the Hanjis, the boatmen of Dal Lake. Patloo was mentioned by PM Modi in his Mann ki Baat for his ambulance service, however, he says that the Hanjis living in houseboats have had promises made of rehabilitation but nothing happened. They do not even have basic facilities like a dispensary and no one has ever been given a government job. Neither the Centre nor the successive local governments have done anything to improve their conditions, Patloo laments. | Images: Courtesy Tariq Patloo
Jaspreet Kaur is the Consulting Editor of Kashmir Newsline.
