Pakistan's Punjab gov't sends schoolchildren on holidays as air quality worsens

By Aamir Latif

LAHORE, Pakistan (AA) – The government of Pakistan’s northeastern Punjab province on Thursday ordered all special education schools in Lahore to send students with conditions susceptible to poor air on a three-month leave from Friday as a deadly smog has already started to choke the provincial capital.

On Thursday, Lahore recorded an alarming Air Quality Index (AQI) of 201 — the second highest in the world, as the government has declared smog a “calamity.”

The government, according to a notification, has banned several pollution-causing activities across the province, including burning any type of crop residue, solid waste, tires, rubber and plastics, as well as vehicles emitting visible smoke and pollutants falling into inadmissible limits.

The early strike by the smog this year also prompted Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz to seek coordination with the neighboring Indian Punjab, which, along with the national capital Delhi, has long been facing the same problem.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-Pakistan in its latest report has made a string of medium and long-term recommendations to tackle the smog-related issues

They include the capacity-building of farmers on crop residue management, promoting renewable energy sources and enforcing compliance in the industrial sector, use of low-cost sensor-based monitoring systems, which can effectively measure pollutants, mandatory vehicular emission testing, and integrated traffic management.

The report found that key contributors to worsening air quality included vehicular emissions, crop residue burning, industrial processes, and coal combustion.

It also lays out a plan to promote electric vehicles (EVs), enhance sustainable development models, segregate industrial zones, expand mass transit networks, and switch to renewable energy sources.