No Rain In Sight For Lahore As Schools Are Told To Carpool

LAHORE: Lahore faces at least a week without meaningful rain, forecasts show, leaving the city’s air to be cleaned by policy alone at the moment schools have been told to make carpooling a formal part of the fight against smog.

Saturday’s high is about 32°C with a low near 22°C and a rain chance of five percent. Daytime temperatures ease to between 28°C and 31°C through the week, and the chance of rain never rises above 15 percent, which comes on Thursday. Nights cool steadily, to around 17°C by next weekend.

Cooler, still nights are what turn October’s haze into November’s smog, because cold air near the ground traps what the city emits. Rain was forecast for October 6 and 7, when the provincial disaster authority issued an alert, and nothing comparable is on the horizon now.

Against that backdrop the Punjab Environmental Protection Agency has directed schools in Lahore to promote carpooling among students, parents and staff, source said. Director General Abdullah Niazi Sheikh ordered that the measure be made a formal part of the anti-smog strategy.

School administrations are to arrange shared use of vehicles, by mutual consent, for families and staff coming from the same areas or along the same routes. The agency’s reasoning is that morning traffic outside schools and the exhaust it produces are major contributors to pollution. Mr Sheikh said individual and unnecessary use of vehicles was making the problem worse and that emergency measures had become necessary.

The directive raises questions it does not answer. The written order has not been published, so it is unclear which schools are covered, from what date, whether any are exempt and what happens to those that ignore it. A school can encourage parents to share a car. It cannot compel them.

The readings justify urgency. Lahore ranked sixth among the world’s most polluted cities on Thursday with an air quality index of 201, and some neighbourhoods were above 250. Smog is already shaping decisions well outside the environment department, including a proposal to move local body elections to April.

Other measures are in place. The province has deployed thermal drones to find pollution sources and this week appealed to builders to cover construction material and sprinkle water on their sites.

Dry weather has a second cost. A power company officer said this week that only rain would ease the electricity shortfall behind Lahore’s night-time outages.

Residents with breathing problems, the elderly and young children are the first to feel a bad-air week. Health advice from the authorities remains to limit time outdoors when readings are high.