Its Exalted Dryness

Pushkar’s holy lake is dry. As the religious and secular alike are beset by a rising sense of panic, we get to the bottom of the crisis.

Tell the cab driver to take you straight to Hotel Sarovar, and ask for Room No 213. It’s the only hotel room in Pushkar with a balcony directly over the lake, and the closest you will get to it with your shoes on. This time though, you will see something horribly amiss when you put your feet up on the pigeon-plop-covered balcony railing, something that will make you gasp.

It’s the sarovar.

Something’s happened to it.

Something terrible.

In PC Sorcar fashion, the waters of the sarovar have disappeared. A cow stands on the dried lake bed, chewing clumps of grass in no apparent hurry.

Anxious to know what happened, we climb down from the perch for a closer look.

The sight is heartbreaking, to say the least. The Naga Kund, believed to assure fertility, has dried up. The same fate has befallen the Roop Tirth Kund, sought for the boons of beauty and power it’s thought to bestow. Look for the Kapil Vyapi, or any of the 49 other ghats along the lakeshore, and it’s the same story—an aquatic absence. It’s an absence that makes itself felt much before you descend that last step. The place used to be agog with devotees heading down for a holy dip, clanging overhead bells along the way. Now, instead, there’s silence. The emptiness is eerie.

Three ghats, we discover, are still in use for dips. They survive on water from a bore well, and are barely the size of a large living room, hardly enough for the 500,000 devotees expected to descend on Pushkar for Kartik Purnima.

Only once before has the sarovar been dry since Lord Brahma, the Creator, is said to have created it. That was during a drought of the 1970s. So what’s happened now? Well, first a well-intentioned scheme for lake rejuvenation went terribly astray, and then the rain gods finished off the job by staging a no show. It’s very likely that the lake will still be dry when the pilgrims turn up to have their sins cleansed and when foreign tourists arrive for the famed Pushkar cattle fair (between 25 October and 2 November).

As we sit at Sunset Café contemplating the lake in its former splendour, there is a sudden downpour. It sends a ripple of excitement through the town. “There is hope yet, it will fill up now,” cries a local resident, running shirtless towards the sarovar. But by the time celebrations can begin in earnest, the rain stops, and the sun returns brighter than before. It’s hardly enough to fill a tea cup, let alone the sarovar.

For the uninitiated, Pushkar is situated in a valley not far from Ajmer, Rajasthan, and the lake is a freshwater one, fed by rainwater which runs off the hillocks that surround it. To Hindu devotees, it assumes significance as Teerth Raj, the king of pilgrimage spots, and religious texts abound with references to it. Apsara Maneka is said to have taken a dip in it, Vishwamitra is said to have performed a ritual of penance here, and above all, it’s regarded as the site of Lord Brahma’s own multiple millennia penance.

Of late, Pushkar has barely had four good days of rainfall, and not even a trickle has made it into the sarovar. There is an unfinished canal in the way. “If the canal hadn’t been blocked from behind, then there would have been at least some water,” says Manoj Pandit, a local resident, “I don’t think the sarovar will fill up in time for Kartik Purnima… now it’s all up to Brahmaji.”

But can mortal handiwork be so easily reversed? Under the National Lake Conservation Plan, work on de-silting the sarovar has been underway since late last year, with contractors draining out the entire lake for it. Refilling it, however, seems to have been left to divine authorities. Even though 85 per cent of the de-silting work is done, the feeder canals lag—with four-fifths of the project yet to be completed. It will finish only by November next year, if all goes well. OP Hinger, who is in charge of the canals, seems unperturbed. “There is only one way for the sarovar to fill… and that is the rain. There is nothing we can do about it,” he says. RK Bansal, the government’s project engineer, is equally unbothered. He pins the dryness on the lack of rainfall and fends off complaints as a kind of collective character flaw. “It’s the public’s job to find fault with whatever is happening,” he says.

Such irritability irritates Pandit. He recalls a Danish engineer who tried to reason with the project’s contractors, suggesting that they divide the sarovar into four parts and de-silt it part by part without draining it all. Nobody listened.

Pandit’s ire sounds even more justified when you look at the main feeder canal, dry as a desert on Mercury; wouldn’t Pushkar have been better off if this canal had been built first?

Gopal Lal Sharma, chairman of Pushkar Nagar Palika, is also annoyed at the way the work has been carried out. On a sunny Sunday, he looks out of a window overlooking the sarovar and shakes his head. “The engineers sat in Delhi and made maps on their computers,” he says, “Look how badly they have done the digging—it’s not even even. They have dug deeper closer to the ghats and then left high patches in the middle of the sarovar and not levelled them. Some of the ghats will now be higher than others. Plus, it will create problems for those going in for a dip once the water does return.”

But that is thinking way too far ahead. There are few signs of the lake filling up anytime soon. Worse, the scraping up of dark sludge has exposed the lake bed’s sandy subsoil, which acts as a sieve for raindrops to seep right through.

To be fair, the decay seems to have set in earlier, as a trip to Pushkar in mid 2008 revealed. The sarovar’s aquatic life was devastated not too long ago by the new practice of Ganesha idol immersions in the water. The fish couldn’t survive the toxins in the idols’ decorative coatings (the practice was thankfully stopped).

What’s new now is the lake’s look—it’s one of devastation. Tourism, the focal point of the local economy, could suffer grievously. According to Sharma, the town does business worth crores during the Pushkar fair. This time, it looks like a washout—without the water.

Salim, owner of a ramshackle tea stall that brews ‘Japanese green tea’, is resigned to a bad tourist season. “We had seen the sarovar dry only once, in 1973 when we were kids… we don’t know if tourists will come if the sarovar is dry,” he says. The lake, locals say, will fill up only if it rains for at least four hours non-stop in the nearby hills. Unfortunately, there’s little chance of that.

Walking through Pushkar, you can’t help being drawn to the one sentiment that seems to unite the townsfolk and their 500-odd temples in prayer—that the drizzle turns into a deluge. How much penance would it take? And by whom?

cattle fairclimate changeecologyPushkartourismwater