Farooq Brazloo
In the high valleys of Kashmir, winter mornings used to arrive wrapped in a hush so complete that you could hear snowflakes settle on woollen pherans. That silence is dying. At 6:50 a.m., when temperatures still hover at –8°C, the first auto-rickshaw rattles into the lanes of Kulgam’s Mirhama village, its rooftop loudspeaker crackling to life: “Gandh thal hyyy… nunn’posh aamsund haasil!” (Onion seedlings… fresh from the nursery!). Ten minutes later another one follows, shouting about three kilos of potatoes for a hundred rupees. By 7:15 the air is thick with overlapping voices, each driver trying to outshout the rest. What begins as commerce ends as assault.
I spoke to Dr. Mushtaq Ahmad Rather, former Head of ENT at SKIMS Medical College, Srinagar. “We are seeing a sharp rise in noise-induced hearing loss among people who never worked in factories or near heavy machinery,” he told me last month. “Village schoolteachers in their thirties are coming with tinnitus that keeps them awake. Children are reporting headaches before classes even begin. The source? These unregulated loudspeakers, often 80–100 decibels at five metres, used for hours every day.”
The World Health Organization classifies anything above 55 dB as harmful when sustained; above 70 dB it becomes physiologically stressful. A 2023 pilot study by the Department of Environment & Remote Sensing, J&K, recorded peak levels of 92 dB inside homes in Pulwama’s Rajpora market area between 6 and 9 a.m. “That’s louder than a power lawnmower pressed against your window,” one researcher remarked.
The damage is not only to the ears. A 2024 paper in the *Indian Journal of Psychiatry* noted that chronic noise exposure is an independent risk factor for hypertension and ischaemic heart disease. In Kashmir, where post-2019 trauma has already pushed psychiatric outpatient numbers through the roof, doctors now speak of “noise as the second trigger”. Dr. Fazle Mahmud, a psychiatrist in Anantnag, says almost 40 per cent of his elderly patients now complain of new-onset insomnia that coincides with the winter vegetable season, when loudspeaker autos multiply.
The worst affected are children and the old. Nine-year-old Ifrah Jan from Shopian told me she covers her ears with pillows every morning. “I get scared when they shout suddenly,” she whispered. Her grandfather, 72-year-old Ghulam Mohammad, suffered a mild heart attack last December. “The doctor asked if anything changed before the episode,” his son recounted. “Baba said the only new thing was that the potato-wala now stops right under our apple tree and blasts his speaker for twenty minutes.”
This is not about shaming poor vendors. Most drivers earn less than ₹400 a day and believe louder announcements bring more customers. One of them, Abdul Rashid of Baramulla, defended the practice: “If I don’t shout, the next auto will take my buyers. We are also feeding families in this cold.” The tragedy is structural, not individual.
Yet solutions exist, and some districts have begun experimenting. In Ganderbal’s Wakura zone, the local Auqaf committee, supported by the Deputy Commissioner, designated two fixed morning slots (7:30–8:00 a.m. and 4:30–5:00 p.m.) and a single shared loudspeaker at the village mosque for all announcements. Vegetable vendors line up, take turns for exactly ninety seconds each, and leave. Noise levels dropped by 70 per cent overnight; sales, vendors say, actually increased because customers now wait at a known spot instead of being chased through lanes.
Bandipora has gone a step further: the district administration is piloting battery-run e-rickshaws with small LED boards displaying prices—no speakers at all. Early results show customers prefer the quiet and often buy more because they can actually talk to the seller.
The legal framework already exists. The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000, clearly define silence zones around schools, hospitals, and courts, and limit loudspeaker use in residential areas from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. with strict decibel caps. But enforcement is almost non-existent in rural Kashmir; many police officers themselves wake to the same cacophony and see little point in booking a vegetable seller trying to feed his children.
It is time to change that. Deputy Commissioners can notify silence hours (say 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.) across rural Kashmir this winter itself. Simple hand-held decibel meters cost less than ₹3,000; one per tehsil would be enough to start. Village committees can maintain a roster and a common microphone, as Wakura has done. The J&K State Pollution Control Board, so far obsessed with Dal Lake’s sewage, must turn its attention to the air we hear.
Kashmir has survived wars, floods, and lockdowns. It should not surrender its mornings to a loudspeaker. The great poet Mahjoor once wrote of this valley: “Wuchh wuchh ti kar sa tul, yima Kashmiran gul gul” (Look and keep looking, these Kashmiri flowers bloom in silence). Let us give the flowers—and our children—the silence they need to open.
The cold is cruel enough. Let it, at least, be quiet.
