Srinagar, June 14 -- It creeps in through the car vents somewhere around Eidgah and only gets worse as you move closer to Saidapora. It's not just a bad smell. It's a wall. Thick, rotten, heavy. The kind that sticks to your skin and won't let go.

But here's the thing. I don't live there. I stay about 22 kilometers away, near Chadoora. I could've ignored all this and moved on with my day. But how long can you look away when an entire population lives beside a mountain of garbage, and no one seems to care?

The Achan Saidapora dumping site in Srinagar holds over 11.5 lakh metric tonnes of legacy waste. These aren't just numbers. These are actual hills of filth that have grown unchecked over decades.

Earlier this year, on March 20, I was i...