OPINION EDITORIAL ON HERITAGE CREATIVE BEATS INTERALIA WIDE ANGLE OTHER VIEW ART SPACE

Does Kashmir Need a Separate Minister for Cleanliness and Waste Management?

Perhaps it is time we created one more ministerial chair – if only to ensure that at least one MLA from the ruling Jammu and Kashmir National Conference finally has a job that is visible, measurable, and impossible to explain away in speeches. After all, portfolios in our system often come wrapped in abstraction – planning, coordination, facilitation – words that float well in files but rarely touch the ground. Cleanliness, on the other hand, is brutally honest. It either exists, or it doesn’t. And in Kashmir today, it clearly does not.

Step outside the comfort of official presentations and curated visits, and the Valley tells a different story. Garbage piles lie unattended along roads that once defined postcard Kashmir. Polythene clings to fences, floats in streams, and chokes the very springs that have sustained life here for centuries. Rural belts – supposedly under structured sanitation systems – often resemble informal dumping yards. Urban spillover quietly finds its way into village commons. What was once a landscape of order now appears increasingly as a landscape of neglect.

EID UL FITR: A celebration of faith, gratitude, and human connection

Eid al-Fitr 2026: A Call for Global Harmony

How India Is Energising a New Growth Story

This is not for lack of departments. Responsibility today is scattered across the Rural Development Department, municipal bodies like the Srinagar Municipal Corporation, the Jammu and Kashmir Pollution Control Committee, and the ever-rotating district administrations. On paper, this is an ecosystem. On the ground, it is an escape route. Each agency operates within its defined boundary; the garbage does not. It flows across........

© Kashmir Images