Kashmir Gets an Amusement Park, but Enviros Are Not Amused

The war-torn Indian province of Kashmir is hardly a place you’d go for amusement — but now, you can go there for an amusement park. That’s right: On Sunday, a private bank unveiled a brand-new amusement park in the town of Pahalgam in the Himalayan foothills, to the delight of many locals, who have been deprived of ordinary entertainment by the ongoing conflict in the region. But environmentalists are not amused in the least; they fear that Pahalgam, long famed for its natural beauty, could become a hotspot for money-hungry developers. They accuse the park of having no facilities to treat its waste products, of not blending in with its surroundings, and of leaking dyes into a nearby river, and they say that the area development board was not consulted about the project.