‘More toxic than ever’: Lahore and Delhi choked with smog as ‘pollution season’ begins

As the smog descended over Lahore, people started feeling the familiar symptoms. First came the sore throat and burning eyes, then the dizziness, tightness in the chest and dry, painful cough.

“It has become a physical ordeal just to go outside,” said Jawaria, 28, a master’s student living in the Pakistani city.

In recent days, air quality in Lahore, home to more than 14 million people, has fallen to the worst levels in the world, with pollution levels up to 15 times higher than considered healthy and the city shrouded in thick brown smoke. The air quality index shows ‘healthy’ at 50 – last week the air quality in Lahore rose above 700.

Across the border in India, the capital Delhi was also shrouded in the annual thick toxic smog that marks the unwelcome start of the “pollution season”, affecting more than 25 million people, while air quality remains in the “very poor” category.

In Delhi and Lahore – cities about 420 kilometers apart – local governments have made pledges and announced measures to prevent the catastrophic levels of pollution that have become an annual occurrence over the past decade. But people complained that the brown smog had arrived even earlier than usual and said all policies to stop it had failed.

“This year the sky was already cloudy in October and the smog feels more toxic than ever,” said Jawaria, who says she has been sick since the pollution worsened. “It gets worse every year; the air has gone from mildly worrisome to downright dangerous. And it’s extremely sad, because Lahore used to have those crisp, sunny winter days when you would walk around the streets and breathe the cool air. Those days now feel like a distant memory.”

One of the causes of the smog is farmers’ practice of burning the stubble of their crops to clean their fields quickly and cheaply. Despite being illegal in India and Pakistan, enforcement is weak and stubble burning continues.

Pakistan’s Punjab government said it had offered farmers alternatives to stubble burning, but Khalid Khokhar, the president of the farmers’ association, denied this. “More than 10 million farmers live and work in Punjab. Burning the crop is the cheapest option, so that’s why it continued. We need help for a cheap alternative for all farmers,” he said.

Air quality is also worsened by industrial emissions from factories and structures, as well as fumes from trucks and cars, which become trapped above cities as cold winter air penetrates.

The problem has become so widespread that Maryam Nawaz, the chief minister of Pakistan’s Punjab, this week proposed putting aside the complex politics of the India-Pakistan relationship and introducing a “smog diplomacy” initiative between the two countries to dangerously high levels of air pollution affecting both countries.

While India and Pakistan are notorious enemies, Nawaz said that “smog is not a political issue but a humanitarian issue,” adding, “The sky does not recognize the borders between our two countries. It is impossible to combat smog unless both Punjabs take joint steps.” India has not yet responded.

The regional health consequences of this annual pollution emergency are catastrophic. According to a report by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute, pollution is the biggest threat to health in India, with Delhi residents losing up to 8.5 years of their lives due to its effects.

Ammar Ali Jan, a historian in Lahore, said clean air had become a luxury that only the city’s wealthy could afford. “Only the elite who can afford air purifiers can breathe safely – it is a form of apartheid,” he said.

Ali Jan said the city had now become “unliveable”. We have turned Lahore and most of Punjab into a concrete jungle and the result is an ecological catastrophe.”

By Friday morning, in the wake of Diwali, Delhi had overtaken Lahore as the most polluted city in the world, partly due to fireworks being set off illegally during the revelry.

At a community clinic in Delhi, Dr Bidyarani Chanu said she had seen a sharp increase in the number of people coming in with respiratory problems, and that about 60% of her patients had pollution-related illnesses, most of whom were children and the elderly.

Sitting at his fruit cart, Shakeel Khan, 36, described the pollution as a “slow poison” but said he had no choice but to work outside when the smog set in.

“In 2019, I lost my father to lung disease,” he said. “He never smoked a day in his life, but the doctors told me his lungs were damaged. Why would that happen to someone who doesn’t smoke? It happened because he, like me, worked on the streets of Delhi.”

Aakash Hassan contributed to this report