The early Miocene Murree Formation, late Miocene Nagri Formation and recent alluvium rockunits are exposed in the sub-Himalayas of the Bagh area, State of Azad Jammu and Kashmir,Pakistan. The Bagh area was badly affected by the Kashmir earthquake of October 8th 2005which, along the Muzaffarabad Fault, deformed both the hanging and footwall blocks. Thecracks, joints, fissures and fractures in houses and bedrocks might have affected theemission of radon to the surface. Indoor radon concentration measurements were carried outin some dwellings of the Bagh area, Azad Kashmir, Pakistan. The measurements were based onpassive integrative detection of radon using CN-85 plastic track detectors in box-typedosimeters. The radon concentration in dwellings was between 50  ±  11.6 Bq·m-3and 167.1  ±  21.4 Bq·m-3with an overall average of 95.1  ±  15.8Bq·m-3(geometric mean  =  93.4 Bq·m-3). The average radonconcentrations in pucka, semi-pucka and kucha houses were 97.6  ±  15.4 Bq·m-3,89.7  ±  15.2 Bq·m-3 and 101.9  ±  15.9 Bq·m-3, respectively. Themean values of radon concentrations in the Nagri Formation, Murree Formation and recentalluvium lithology were 99.3  ±  15.8, 90.1 and 96.2  ±  15.5 Bq·m-3,respectively. The annual effective dose to the Bagh population was calculated as 2.38  ± 0.77 (1.33  ±  0.2 to 4.7  ±  0.5) mSv. The average radon (95.1  ±  15.8Bq·m-3) concentration in dwellings for the inhabitants of the Bagh area wassafe from radon-related health hazards and was within the recommended action level (ICRPpublication 65 (1993) Protection against radon at home and at work, InternationalCommission on Radiological Protection, Ann. ICRP 23(2)).The indoor radonvalues obtained in the present study are more than the world average of 40Bq·m-3 (UNSCEAR (2000) United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects ofAtomic radiation, Report to the General Assembly, United Nations, New York).

In view of its high potential for containing large amounts of radioactive materials and due to its wide-spread use as construction and facing material worldwide, radiation doses received from the marble used in dwellings have been determined. As a first step, specific activity measurements were made using a NaI(Tl) gamma ray spectrometer using the spectrum stripping technique. For the samples studied, the average values of specific activities for 226Ra, 232Th and 40K have been found to be 27, 26 and 58 Bg kg-1 respectively. The mesh-adaptive, volume-integral method based code INGRE (Mirza et al., 1991) gave calculated values of the dose equivalent rates inside the standard room (Tufail et al., 1994) due to 226Ra, 232Th and 40K; these we re found to lie between 5-77, 12-52 and 1-11 nGy h-1 respectively. The values of whole-body dose equivalent rates have been found to lie in the 27-108 nGy h-1 range. As these values are below internationally accepted maximum permissible values, therefore marble available in Pakistan can safelybe used in dwellings as a construction material.