Wular Lake in Bandipora district once spread across roughly 260 square kilometres. Today, depending on the season and the survey, that figure sits somewhere between 80 and 130 square kilometres. The rest has become reed beds, agricultural encroachments, and shallow mud flats that dry out in summer. Hokersar, a Ramsar-designated wetland on the outskirts of Srinagar, has lost more than half its open water area over the past five decades. These are not slow, invisible changes. Fishermen who worked the same channels as their fathers now pole through stands of Phragmites reed where there was open water a generation ago.
