By Sheikh Mushtaq SRINAGAR, India, June 22 (Reuters) - India will spend more than $290 million cleaning up two iconic lakes in Kashmir, India's environment minister said on Monday, which have been polluted during decades of neglect and a separatist revolt. Dal Lake, the region's main tourist attraction which has drawn visitors from Mughal emperors to the Beatles star George Harrison, has shrunk from 25 sq km to 13 sq km since the 1980s, environmental campaigners say. Raw sewage, rubbish and land encroachment threaten the survival of the lake which dominates Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir state and hub of a 20-year insurgency that officials says hampered cleanup efforts in the past. The idyllic Himalayan region's other prominent lake, Wular, which authorities say was once Asia's largest freshwater lake, has reduced to half its original size. "This conservation effort is the first serious fully funded effort," Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, said at a news conference in Srinagar. Thousands of tonnes of sewage spew into Dal Lake, feeding weeds and choking the lake and its aquatic life of oxygen. The government plans to clean and remove the weeds, build new sewage treatment plants, and pay at least 10,000 families living on the waterfront to relocate. Authorities and many environmentalists blame these families, some of whom have lived there for generations, for dumping rubbish, sewage and waste into the lake whose trademark wooden houseboats have been a tourist magnet for decades. Some residents have in the past been slow to accept cash to relocate, saying the move would rob them of their livelihoods. The state government has neglected the region's environment while battling a separatist revolt that has killed tens of thousands since 1989, environmentalists say. The government has made previous pledges to clean up Kashmir's waters, saying cleanup operations have only been made possible because the insurgency is at its lowest level in years. Monday's announcement left some environmentalists unconvinced. "The past experience suggests that these are all hollow promises. I am sure nothing is going to come out and unfortunately these two rich water bodies will be extinct in the near future," Adeel S. Bhat, an environmental campaigner, said. (Editing by Matthias Williams)
Activists of the regional Trinamool Congress hold placards while taking part in a rally to protest against the government's actions in Lalgarh, in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata June 22, ...
