Air pollution has become the new normal for student Rania Ali’s community. But instead of resigning herself to the impacts on her health, life, and education, she is pushing back. Read her call for change.

Every year, for the last 10 years or so, there comes one morning in November, right before midterms, when I glance out of my front balcony window, across the street, and don’t see my neighbour’s house. The thick, yellow-grey blanket of smog swallows the city where I live — Lahore, Pakistan — whole; I can see nothing past the balcony railing.

It is not fog. It has no morning enchantment. It is a menace. My school delays its start by an hour or two, week after week, because low visibility makes it unsafe to travel to school, and the air is unsafe to breathe. The air outside has become hostile, the kind of hostility measured not in words but in the choking breath of wheezing classmates, and curled-up sleeves of scarves around mouths that you come across once there.

The grey haze isn’t a backdrop; it’s the wallpaper of our daily lives. I remember our school announcing the construction of indoor gyms, “safe spaces,” the administration called them, to keep us away from the outside air, which had turned unpredictable and hazardous. 

In the late autumn of 2024, when the air quality index (AQI) in the city reached well over 1,500, and in some pockets nearly 1,900, Lahore was officially ranked the world’s most polluted city. For context, zero to fifty is considered safe, and we initiate our late starts when the AQI exceeds 150 for several consecutive days. 

We talk about smog as though it’s nature’s fault, but the truth is far darker. The haze that chokes Lahore arises from a toxic cocktail of vehicle emissions, industrial smokestacks, unchecked construction dust, brick kilns, and crop-stubble burning in the Punjab region.

Yet policy remains reactive instead of proactive. The provincial government in Punjab scrambled together emergency measures when the AQI spiked, but there was no long-term, consistent authority untethered from shifting politics, corruption, and institutional neglect. Governance changes, unstable political alliances, and distracted agendas all lead to weak implementation of anti-pollution policy.

In a city like Lahore, where administrations change and policies are shelved faster than smog clears, the systemic failure becomes personal. Every day you wake up and ask: Is it safe to breathe? But you give up on the question because you don’t trust the answer.

When air quality drops to hazardous levels, the cost isn’t abstract. It is hours lost at school, days lost to illness, long-term lung damage, and shortened life expectancy. According to the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) fact sheet, Pakistan is the world’s third most polluted country, and fine particulate pollution shortens average life expectancy by nearly four years, with the worst-affected regions losing almost seven.

Media coverage swings between shock (“Lahore is the most polluted city in the world”) and resignation (“Well, it happens every winter”). The narrative frames smog as inevitable, “a part of life,” rather than an outcome of preventable policy failures. This matters because when the story is “inevitable,” the will to fix it dissipates. The day my school announced indoor gym class, it was broadcast as ingenuity, but underneath it signalled defeat: the city cannot guarantee safe outdoor spaces.

The media also seldom highlights the long-term damage to children and the educational loss that occurs when schools shut down for days due to hazardous air. The campus that should hum with ideas becomes silent because breathing itself becomes risky. We need media that not only report peaks of AQI but also track policy recurrences, accountability, and the lives of children who have been delayed, disrupted, and diminished.

For the economy, poor air quality means lost productivity and diminished health capital. And yet, we keep investing in expansion — roads, buildings, vehicles — without matching investment in clean air, monitoring, and enforcement. That imbalance is economically unsustainable.

When my classmates stayed home because outdoor PE was cancelled, and parents kept their children indoors instead of letting them play outside, it had a cost: a cost in health, in lost socialising, in the carefree hours of youth taken by smoke. In government schools, where classrooms are overcrowded and many buildings lack proper windows or ventilation, the problem runs even deeper. There are no air purifiers, no “safe indoor spaces,” just suffocating air, making the inequality of air visible to the naked eye. 

We talk about the right to education and the right to health, but what use are those rights when the air itself makes learning unsafe? A classroom can’t be a sanctuary if every breath taken inside it carries the risk of harm. The moment I could not see my neighbour’s house, I understood: clear sight, clear breath, and free movement are not luxuries. They are fundamental prerogatives of being human. If breathing becomes a calculated risk, our society is failing the basic contract.

A moral contract between citizen and state says: provide safe air and safe spaces to live and learn. But when that is broken, we begin to ask: who will safeguard our breath? When the city shut schools, closed parks, and recommended masks like summer wear, it was a moral failure as much as a policy one. 

So here’s what I propose, from the mind of a student who has witnessed neighbours disappear into haze, schools delay, and lungs strain: we need a separate national-level authority. This body must be independent, insulated from political turnover, funded sustainably, and empowered to implement monitoring, enforcement, public education, and policy continuity.

Why separate? Because right now, climate policy is caught in shifting political sands. Government departments change, policies stall, and leadership moves onto the next crisis. Meanwhile, our air continues to kill silently. Lahore’s October to February smog surge is predictable, yet responses are reactive, patchy, and temporary.

This authority should:

• Install transparent, real-time air-quality monitoring throughout all districts, not just major stations.
• Create legally enforceable emission limits for vehicles, industries, and kilns.
• Manage an annual crop-residue-burning mitigation program with neighbouring regions, both within Pakistan and across the border, to prevent seasonal surges.
• Launch public-education campaigns so that smog is not accepted as “normal autumn.”
• Bridge media, student bodies, industry, and government, so the narrative becomes: clear air is non-negotiable.
• Create climate-resilient infrastructure. Schools with an indoor gym as a backup are good, but should not replace outdoor access for generations.

The smog that cloaks my neighbourhood, shuts my school, and chases us indoors isn’t just weather; it’s a symptom of multiple failures: governance, economy, education, and morality. When you cannot see your neighbour’s house, you cannot pretend everything is fine. When a student watches their playground get locked because the air outside is unsafe, you realise we are not just losing days, we are losing the trust that breathing should be free.

And so I say: let us not sleepwalk into another winter of smoke. Let us build the institution, the mindset, the narrative that says this city, this country, values every breath. Because clear air is a human right, and in Lahore, I have been deprived of this right.

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