Of late, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been stressing on improving public hygiene and sanitation in the country. An important step by the government in this regard has been to provide closed toilets that decompose human feces without allowing the insects in the environment to become the carriers of diseases. This crucial intervention has already started showing results with the country recently declared as open defecation free. Besides, a slew of schemes and programs have been devised by the central government to focus the government’s attention on the issue of improving public hygiene. However, a cursory look at the situation in Jammu and Kashmir shows that we may be going from bad to worse. Rivers are known to have sustained civilizations. Be it The Nile in Egypt, Thames in London or Jhelum in Srinagar, ancient cities have been raised along rivers to provide an important source of sustenance for humanity: water. However, with population explosion resulting in mushrooming of habitations and the lack of governmental oversight, we have been willfully and deliberately using Jhelum river and its tributaries as the carrier of the garbage and sewage produced by households and industrials plants. The river has also become a dumping ground for dead animals. According to a recent survey, around 300 lavatories open into Doodhganga tributary, a major drinking water source for Srinagar and its peripheries. This is besides the household sewerage from hundreds of houses and business units that pollute the important feeding tributary of the Jhelum river. According to official data, around six lakh people in Budgam and Srinagar district of the Valley get water from this polluted source. Sadly, the Public Health Engineering department’s efforts for purification of water before it is delivered to household are restricted to chlorination and sedimentation. However, these processes do not make the water safe for human consumption and in fact put the people at more risk due to the lack of an effective quality monitoring mechanism of drinking water in different parts of the twin districts. While the state government and the district administration is culpable for this open violation of environmental norms at the hands of ordinary citizens and businessmen alike, people also have some social and moral duty towards protecting the environment which sustains our civilization. We also have to share a part of the blame. Small steps lead to big changes. If we take a pledge to treat our environment like we treat our children, a positive change is not so far away.