BADIN, Dec 3: The mushrooming of cattle pens in the middle of densely populated residential areas in the city is adding to pollution and causing serious health hazards for people.

According to a rough estimate, over 100 cattle pens with more than 2,000 cattle are established across the city. Foul smelling heaps of buffalo and cow dung add to the already filthy and unhygienic atmosphere in most wards of the city, particularly Bhurgari Mohalla where overflowing gutters and heaps of garbage on roadsides greet the eye everywhere.

No authority or department appears to take responsibility for sanitation in the city because no measures have ever been take to clean residential areas.

Everyday after sunset, the city’s atmosphere is filled with thick, stinging and suffocating smoke when the cattle pen owners burn trash, garbage and rotten fodder to produce smoke to ward off mosquitos from their prized animals, caring little for the danger it may pose to human breath.

But this is not the end of the story. Besides this smoke, a more dangerous gas, carbon monoxide, is released into the air when pen’s waste is set on fire in the open.

“We can not shift our cattle outside the city as it will have an adverse impact on our business,” said several cattle owners while talking to Dawn. However, they said they were ready to move their animals to a cattle colony if it was built for them by the authorities concerned.

Social activists said that majority of cattle owners came from rural areas and they were reluctant to shift their animals away from the city because it would increase cost of milk after addition of transportation expenses.

They criticised the town administration for doing nothing to save the town’s residents from the ill-effects of cattle pens in their midst and demanded immediate shifting of the pens out of the city.