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

As the smog descended over Lahore, people began to feel the familiar symptoms. First came the scratchy throat and burning eyes, then the dizziness, tightness in the chest and the dry racking cough. “It’s become a physical ordeal just to go outdoors,” said Jawaria, 28, a master’s student living in the Pakistani city. In recent days, the air quality in Lahore, home to more than 14 million people, dropped to the worst levels on Earth, with pollution levels up to 15 times higher than is deemed healthy and the city enveloped in a thick brown smoke. On the air quality index, “healthy” is 50 – last week Lahore’s air quality soared above 700. Over the border in India, the capital, Delhi, was also shrouded in the annual thick toxic smog that marks the unwelcome beginning of “pollution season”, affecting more than 25 million people, with air quality remaining in the “very poor” category. In Delhi and Lahore, cities about 260 miles apart, local 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 the policies to stop it had failed. “This year, the skies were already clouded in October and the smog feels more toxic than ever,” said Jawaria, who said she had been sick since the pollution worsened. “It’s worse every year; the air has gone from mildly concerning to downright hazardous. And it’s extremely sad, because Lahore used to have these crisp, sunny winter days, where you’d walk the streets and breathe in the cool air. Those days feel like a distant memory now.” One of the causes of the smog is farmers’ practice of burning the stubble of their crops to quickly and cheaply clear their fields. Despite being illegal in India and Pakistan, enforcement is weak and the stubble burning has continued. The Punjab government in Pakistan 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 has continued. We need help for a cheap alternative for all farmers,” he said. The air quality is also worsened by industrial emissions from factories and construction, as well as fumes from trucks and cars, which get trapped over the cities as the cold winter air sets in. The problem has become so pervasive that this week Maryam Nawaz, the chief minister of Punjab in Pakistan, proposed putting 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 air pollution affecting them both. While India and Pakistan are notorious foes, Nawaz said “smog is not a political but a humanitarian issue”, adding: “The air doesn’t recognise borders between our two countries. It’s impossible to fight smog unless both Punjabs take steps together.” India has yet to respond. The regional health impacts of this annual pollution emergency are catastrophic. According to a report released 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 life owing to its effects. Ammar Ali Jan, a historian in Lahore, said clean air had become a luxury only the wealthy in the city could afford. “Only the elite who can afford air purifiers can breathe safely – it’s a form of apartheid,” he said. Ali Jan said the city had now become “unliveable. We have turned Lahore and most of the Punjab into a concrete jungle and the result is ecological catastrophe.” By Friday morning, in the aftermath of Diwali, Delhi had overtaken Lahore as the world’s most polluted city, in part owing to firecrackers that were illegally set off in the festival revelry. In a Delhi community health clinic, doctor Bidyarani Chanu said she had seen a steep rise in people coming in with breathing issues, and that about 60% of her patients had pollution-related illnesses, most of them children and elderly people. 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 as the smog set in. “In 2019, I lost my father to a lung disease,” he said. “He never smoked a day in his life but doctors told me his lungs were damaged. Why would that happen to a person if he is not smoking? It happened because he was working, like me, on the streets of Delhi.” Aakash Hassan contributed to this report • The caption for the third image in this article was amended on 4 November 2024. It shows New Delhi, not Lahore as an earlier version had indicated.