As the smog descended on Lahore, people began to feel the deudo symptoms. First came the itchy throat and burning eyes, then the dizziness, tightness in the chest, and dry, stinging cough.
“The simple act of going outdoors has become a physical test,” 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 on the planet, with pollution levels up to 15 times higher than what is considered healthy and the city enveloped in thick brown smoke. On the air quality index, “healthy” is 50; Lahore's air quality exceeded 700 last week.
Across the border in India, the caudal Delhi was also shrouded in thick annual smog marking the unpleasant start of the “pollution season,” which affects more than 25 million people, and quality air remains in the “very bad” category.
In Delhi and Lahore – cities separated by about 420 kilometers – lugar governments have made promises and announced measures to prevent the catastrophic levels of pollution that have become an annual event 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 skies were already cloudy in October and the smog seems more toxic than ever,” said Jawaria, who said she had been sick since the pollution worsened. “Every year it gets worse; the air has gone from mildly concerning to downright dangerous. And it is extremely sad, because Lahore used to have those cool, sunny winter days, when you would walk through the streets and breathe fresh air. Those days now seem like a distant memory.”
One of the causes of smog is the practice of farmers burning crop stubble to clear their fields quickly and cheaply. Despite being illegal in India and Pakistan, law enforcement is weak and stubble burning has continued.
The Punjab government in Pakistan said it had offered farmers alternatives to stubble burning, but Khalid Khokhar, president of the farmers' association, denied this. “More than 10 million farmers live and work in Punjab. Burning the crop is the cheapest option, which is why it has continued. “We need help to find a cheap alternative for all farmers,” he said.
Air quality is also worsened by industrial emissions from factories and construction, as well as fumes from trucks and cars, which become trapped over cities as cold winter air arrives.
The problem has become so widespread that this week Maryam Nawaz, the chief minister of Pakistan's Punjab, proposed setting aside the complex politics of the India-Pakistan relationship to introduce a “smog diplomacy” initiative between the two countries to address dangerously high levels of pollution. Air pollution affects both countries.
While India and Pakistan are notorious enemies, Nawaz said “smog is not a political issue but a humanitarian one,” adding: “The air does not recognize borders between our two countries. It is impossible to fight smog unless both Punjabs take joint measures.” India is yet to respond.
The regional health impacts of this annual pollution emergency are catastrophic. According to a report published by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, pollution is the biggest health threat in India, with Delhi residents losing up to 8.5 years of their lives due to its effects.
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Ammar Ali Jan, a historian from Lahore, said clean air had become a luxury that only the city's rich could afford. “Only the elite who can afford to buy air purifiers can breathe safely; “It is a form of apartheid,” he said.
Ali Jan said the city had become “uninhabitable”. “We have turned Lahore and most of Punjab into a concrete jungle and the result is an ecological catastrophe.”
By Friday morning, after Diwali, Delhi had overtaken Lahore as the most polluted city in the world, partly due to firecrackers that were illegally set off during the competition's spree.
At a Delhi community health clinic, Dr Bidyarani Chanu said she had seen a sharp rise in the number of people arriving with respiratory problems and that around 60% of her patients had pollution-related illnesses, most of them children and elderly.
Sitting in front of his fruit cart, Shakeel Khan, 36, described the pollution as a “slow poison” but said he had no choice but to work outside as 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 a person if they don't smoke? It happened because he was working, like me, on the streets of Delhi.”
Aakash Hassan contributed to this report.
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