MLA Chadoora rightly said, “who allowed the unauthorized brick kilns to operate illegally for about eight long years?” This needs an honest answer.
Dr. Ashraf Zainabi
Lately, the district adminstration of Budgamdemolished roughly six chimneys of the six brick kilns in Beerwah and Chadoora Tehsils. There is a mixed reaction to this development, some say well done and some labelled it anti-people and anti-livelihood operation.So, what next? Once upon a time, Budgam was known for its karewas, almond blossoms, saffron fields, and the quiet dignity of rural Kashmir. Today, it is acquiring a new identity, one that no tourism brochure would dare to print. Out of roughly 550 brick kilns operating in Kashmir, more than 300 are packed into Budgam district alone. Numbers, when repeated often, lose their shock value. But when translated into lived reality, smoke, dust, ash, scorched earth, they begin to speak. With such an overwhelming presence of batthe—the Kashmiri word for brick kiln, Budgam may as well be renamed Bat-thegam. This is not an exaggeration, nor an insult. It is a literal description of what the landscape has become. Wherever one travels in Budgam, past villages, along highways, near streams, tall chimneys rise like unwanted monuments. They do not mark heritage or progress; they mark extraction. Soil is lifted, moulded into kacha bricks, fired, sold, and forgotten. What remains is land that can no longer grow, breathe, or heal easily. Satire, they say, is born when reality becomes too absurd to describe plainly. It is indeed strange that a district once valued for its fertile karewas is now celebrated for supplying bricks. We speak proudly of development, yet the raw material of this development is taken from under our own feet. We build roads and houses elsewhere by unbuilding Budgam piece by piece. Development, in this model, is like a traveller that eats its host. The irony deepens when these brick kilns are often described as “small industries.” Small they may be on paper, but collectively they behave like a giant monster.
“Budgam requires a strict policy shift that views land as a finite heritage rather than an industrial resource. Without immediate limits on the destruction of the karewas, the region’s identity and physical landscape risk being permanently erased, turning a living geography into a historical footnote.”
A giant that consumes agricultural land, pollutes air, contaminates water, and employs labour under conditions we prefer not to see. Children, seasonal migrants, and the poorest locals form the invisible workforce of this new economy. Their lives are baked into the bricks, but never counted in project reports. If Budgam is now Bat-thegam, then what is its official language? Smoke. What is its climate? Perpetual haze. What is its future crop? Bricks, stacked where wheat once grew. We have quietly accepted this transformation without public debate, without environmental accounting, and without asking a simple question: how many kilns are too many? Have the successive district and tehsilauthorities preferred to look awayat a time when the brick kiln chimneys continued to multiply? This needs an honest answer.Authorities cannot simply say, “they don’t know” that how these many unauthorized brick kilns were operating in the district since so many years. On the peoples part, what makes the situation truly satirical is our selective outrage. We worry about shrinking wetlands, melting glaciers, and vanishing forests, and rightly so. Yet the slow death of karewas under brick kilns barely disturbs us. Perhaps because it happens gradually. Perhaps because bricks look solid, useful, respectable, and profitable. Destruction wrapped in utility is easier to tolerate. Budgam does not need sympathy. It needs reflection. It needs limits. It needs a policy that understands land as more than raw material. If this continues unchecked, future generations may read about karewas in textbooks the way we read about lost civilizations, with curiosity, not memory. Renaming Budgam as Bat-thegam may sound like satire today. Tomorrow, it may simply be geography.
(The author is a teacher and a researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora of Central Kashmir’s Budgam district. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
[email protected]
