Srinagar, Aug. 29 -- By Syed Nissar H. Gilani

A photograph taken in May 1998 shows a group of young revenue officers from Jammu and Kashmir standing on the grounds of the Officers Training College in Jaipur, now the Rajasthan Institute of Public Administration.

The occasion was technical: a course on satellite imagery for land records, part of a push to move Indian states away from hand-drawn maps and toward modern surveying.

Sixteen years later, several of the men in that photograph became the reason help reached Dal Lake at all.

When catastrophic floods submerged parts of Srinagar and the lake itself in 2014, one of the men who travelled there with a team of Jaipur businessmen carrying relief supplies was Professor Hassan, who had t...