Red eyes, coughing, the smell of smoke everywhere and cars driving around with their headlights on in broad daylight. A toxic cloud resurfaces the Pakistani city of Lahore and its citizens begin to get desperate.
This megacity of 11 million people near the Indian border was once the capital of the Mongol Empire and still remains Pakistan’s cultural epicenter.
It now often appears among the most polluted in the world, when a mixture of low-quality diesel fuel emissions, seasonal crop-burning gases and low winter temperatures merge into a dense, opaque haze.
Syed Hasnain is visibly tired as he waits for his four-year-old son, who has just been admitted to Mayo Hospital.
“I was coughing, I couldn’t breathe well and I had a high fever. We thought at most it could be coronavirus and we brought it to the hospital. But doctors told us he developed pneumonia due to the toxic cloud,” Hasnain told AFP.
“It’s very worrying,” he says.
“I knew that this pollution could be bad for our health, but I didn’t know it could be so bad to end up with my son in hospital”, he adds.
Teachers are also concerned about their students.
“Pollution is a problem even inside the room. We see children with red and irritated eyes, others cough all the time,” says Nadia Sarwar, a teacher at a public school.
A child with asthma had to stay at home for several days because he had attacks all the time, he added.
Across the border, the Indian capital, New Delhi, has closed schools indefinitely due to high levels of pollution. Sarwar finds it difficult to do the same in Lahore, however.
Students have already missed many classes in the covid-19 pandemic, and closing schools would now make students “pay for a problem they didn’t create”.
“I feel bad for them,” he laments.
“In summer, it’s too hot for outdoor activities. And in winter there is pollution and dengue now. What can a child do? Where can you go”, he asks.
– “Nobody cares” –
Adults are sick too. Rana Bibi, a mother of three who works as a cleaning lady, wears her shawl as a face mask while waiting for a bicycle taxi to return home.
“The smoke bothers my eyes and my throat. So I cover my face like this. First, they forced us to do this for the coronavirus. Now I do it alone,” she explains.
“When I go home, I always smell like smoke. My clothes, my hair, my hands are dirty. But what can you do? I can’t just sit at home. I got used to it”, he says.
Some of the houses where she works “have these machines to clean the air. I do not know. That’s what they tell me. But here there is smoke everywhere.”
In recent years, residents have built domestic air purifiers and filed lawsuits against the government in desperate attempts to clean the air.
Authorities are slow to act, however, blaming India for the pollution, or ensuring the data is exaggerated.
“Every year, we read in the newspapers that Lahore is the most polluted city in the world, or that it had the worst toxic cloud in the world. But nothing happens. Nobody cares,” protests Saira Aslam, who works in the human resources department of a technology company. The 27-year-old is angry.
“The government escaped last year because we were all sitting at home because of the confinement. But they cannot continue acting as if nothing is wrong,” he adds.
“I have elderly people at home who are literally at risk from the cloud of pollution. It is a health hazard and must be treated as such”, he stressed.
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