Healing turns harmful

In the tranquil and often overlooked rural areas of Kashmir, a quiet danger is festering—one that poses a serious threat to community health, livestock, and the environment. It’s not violence. It’s not drugs. It’s something more pernicious and completely man-made: the uncontrolled disposal of biomedical waste by private clinics, diagnostic labs, medical shops, and unruly practitioners.

Across various villages and towns, a disturbing pattern is appearing. Biomedical waste—used syringes, needles, tubes bottles, blood stained cotton, diagnostic kits, expired drugs, and even human tissue and fluid samples—are being discarded openly in fields, streams, roadside bins, and even near residential homes. There’s no pretreatment, no segregation, no incineration. Just raw, bio hazardous waste in plain sight.

While these clinics and labs offer cure and care on the front end, what happens behind the curtains is an entirely different story. Behind every medication administered and every test conducted lies a potential hazard waiting to be unleashed.

The Hidden Epidemic:

Imagine an unsuspecting child picking up a colourful syringe from a field. A hungry bird pecking on a blood-stained gauze. A dog chewing on discarded IV tubes. These aren’t just speculative scenarios— they’re daily occurrences in many parts of rural Kashmir.

Such waste can harbour HIV, hepatitis viruses, TB bacteria, drug resistant pathogens and other life- threatening organisms. With no safety barriers, these organisms can enter households through animals, drinking water supplies, or even farm produce. This is a biological time bomb, ticking silently in plain sight.

Who’s Responsible?

While the Bio-Medical Waste Management Rules laid down by the Government of India and State Government mandate strict pretreatment, collection, segregation, transport, and disposal procedures— even for the smallest health setups—the implementation of these rules in rural areas is either weak or non-existent.

Private health setups prosper in these areas due to limited or no access to government healthcare, but regulations to these setups are missing. Most of these establishments either lack registration or run without any accountability regarding biomedical waste disposal, which poses the main threat to the public health of these areas.

A Wake-Up Call to Authorities:

It is high time the government and health departments work in coordination and take serious note of this growing disaster before it turns irreversible.

Biomedical waste isn’t just “trash”; it’s a potential mix of infectious microbes, toxic substances and sharp objects—each capable of causing harm to humans long after it leaves a health setup premises. The fact that such hazardous waste is lying in the open is a direct violation of the Bio-Medical Waste Management Regulations and breach of every citizen’s right to a safe environment.

Some urgent steps to be taken by authorities could include:

Conduct surprise visits of private clinics, labs, nursing homes and pharmacies—especially in rural areas.

Impose penalties and closure notices for violators.

Immediate audits of private health setups in rural areas.

Make registration and licensing with biomedical waste compliance as a prerequisite.

Setting up common biomedical waste collection points in each block, tehsil and village.

Awareness programmes among people to report illegal dumping of biomedical waste.

If left unchecked, this negligence could trigger outbreaks more fatal than we can imagine, affecting the poorest households first due to lack of resources. We must remember that in rural areas, health infrastructure is weak—one major outbreak could overburden facilities within days. The warning signs are here, and the clock is ticking. The government, local societies, and media must coordinate with each other now, not after the first headlines scream about a non-preventable outbreak. The Rural Paradox:

Rural Kashmir is romanticized and seen as a destination which is untouched and pure. There is great beauty here, however, beneath this beauty is a system that is becoming unhinged at the edges. It is quite possible that the same destinations people come to in order to get cured can turn into new disease sources.

The question that needs to be asked is: Will we wait until there is an outbreak before we do something? Or will we as society raise pointers to this silent killer and insist that something be done about it before it is too late?

Kashmir surely cannot be subjected to another health outbreak—not one that can be entirely avoided and the product of ignorance and connivance. Carelessness should not have the privilege of poisoning our valleys. We must insist on responsibility and environmental fairness—for ourselves, our children, and our land.

Final Thoughts:

Health care should be healing, not damaging. Our environment, future generations, and our health will all be at risk if we let biomedical waste spread unchecked. Another avoidable crisis is too costly for rural Kashmir. The message is straightforward: proper waste management is a duty owed to our people and our land, not merely a regulation. Care must not turn into carelessness.

Imran Nazir, a nursing student, writes about public health, environment and social issues.