Something is seriously off with Kashmir’s spring. 

This past February, Srinagar clocked 21 degrees Celsius. That is ten degrees above normal. It was the warmest February ever recorded. 

For 13 lakh families who depend on the land, this is a direct threat to their survival.

The old Kashmiri calendar had a name for spring: Sonth. It meant snow melting slowly, and water seeping deep into the soil. 

Roots drank at their own pace. Trees woke up when they were supposed to. But that climate clock is dead. 

We now get weather whiplash. Spring has sadly become a crisis of bad timing.

Here is how the trouble starts. 

Srinagar runs hot early because of the urban heat island effect. We are seeing May temperatures while it is still March. This fools our orchards. 

The apple trees need a specific number of chilling hours to stay dormant. Instead they wake up weeks ahead of schedule. Agricultural experts and regional media have flagged the danger. This early greening leaves our orchards naked and exposed. 

A single late frost can kill the blossoms in one night. And with that, one year’s income is gone.

The human cost lands hard on the families tied to Kashmir’s apple farming. 

Confused weather means financial ruin. Heat spikes trigger erratic blooming. Then a sudden cold snap follows. Delicate flowers freeze and drop. The result is total crop failure.

The damage does not stop there. 

Winter failed to build its usual snow bank. The ground lacks the deep moisture that budding trees desperately need. Farmers now scramble to irrigate parched land. They sink money into borewells, and pay tanker rates that devour their margins. Input costs keep climbing, while income for small growers keeps falling. Food security for the entire region wobbles on the edge.

The pain gets worse because we broke our own water systems. 

Back in February, I called for restoring our waterways. I argued then that filled-in kuls and seized wetlands were our only buffer against chaos. Nobody acted.

Spring now brings two brutal extremes. First comes the dry spell. Without slow-release snowmelt, our springs and irrigation canals run empty exactly when saplings need water most. 

Second comes the flash flood. When rain finally arrives, it hits as a wall of water. Past floods have wrecked nearly 78,000 hectares of crops. We paved over our natural sponges. The wetlands are gone. So the water races into Smart City streets and low-lying farms. It drowns paddy fields, and rots orchard roots. We turned our own safety net into a concrete trap.

Our ancestors understood something we have forgotten. 

The city’s health depended on water and weather moving together. That coordination is shot to pieces. 

We see flowers blooming in January and hailstorms tearing through June. This confused spring stems directly from urban planning that treats wetlands as empty lots and concrete as progress.

We cannot afford to wait for the weather to fix itself. We must rebuild the natural infrastructure that once absorbed these shocks. 

We need to reopen the traditional waterways, and protect the green spaces that cool us down. 

If we fail, Srinagar stays stuck in permanent emergency. 

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We swing between drought and flood with no middle ground to stand on.

The wildfire is still burning, while we carry drops of water in our beaks. We must use them to reclaim our seasons. 

We must act now, or Sonth becomes nothing more than a memory from a time when the earth still knew how to keep proper time.

 The author is a resident of Srinagar, and can be reached at [email protected].

© Kashmir Observer