As the Kashmir valley is heading towards peak winters, local mostly in remote and far flung areas continue the legacy of burning pruned leaves and tree branches to make a coal of it.
This practice reported is hazardous to the people who live nearby the place wherein it is been done because of the huge quantity of smoke that it produces. This practice needs to be avoided so that the people especially those suffering from the lung disease won’t be affected.
Doctors in the major hospitals also have reported that they are attending a huge number of patients particularly the COPD and asthma patients who are the first respondents to get affected.
There is a dire need of the concerned authorities to issue advisories to the people particularly those living in remote and far flung areas to preserve the precious lives of the people.
Besides, an awareness drive is required to sensitize the people about the ill effects of the practice that is affecting those suffering the lung related disease.
As a result of its inception out of necessity, this type of wood-burning practice now has a very disturbing new chapter in the public health history of the region going forward.
Behind the warmth and glow of the burning of these orchard fires is a rapidly growing public health emergency due to the abundance of smoke being produced by this practice and how it is having an adverse effect on families who are already vulnerable and have compromised pulmonary health.
While it can be easily argued that there is a great amount of economic and practical logic that has allowed this type of wood-burning activity to remain a viable option for communities for many generations, it should be recognised that although homemade charcoals produced from wood-burning are often the primary source of heat for many families during winter, they are also the means by which agricultural waste is transformed into energy.
The byproducts of the agricultural process are often treated as a nuisance, but they now have developed into a collective assault on the environment.
The scale of mortality resulting from modern horticulture has caused the amount of biomass burned and the amount of pollution released into the environment to become an unprecedented scale.
Thus, due to the geography of the valleys in the region, a large volume of smoke from this process does not simply dissipate but rather accumulates heavily in the bottom of each valley and then becomes trapped during times of temperature inversion. Thus, during the time of year when this wood-burning practice is greatly utilized, pulmonologists and doctors are seeing a marked increase in patients suffering from asthma, chronic bronchitis, and other respiratory illnesses.
