Need for efficient response
The smog is here again almost at the same time as last year but with wider reach and greater intensity than ever witnessed before. It continues to engulf Punjab for the fifth consecutive day. The situation is particularly alarming in south and central districts of the province. The pall of smog is affecting all kinds of traffic: on the motorway, ordinary roads as well as air travel. Smog density has already led to the shut down of four nuclear power plants, Chashma I-IV, in addition to some of the other power plants, adding to unannounced loadshedding.
Both local and regional factors have contributed to the phenomenon. The former include crop stubble burning, factories which make use of all kinds of harmful materials including old tyres for fuel, traffic congestion, old vehicles with bad engines still visible on the roads, two-stroke auto and cycle rickshaws that continue to ply despite being banned, coal based power plants and high level of deforestation in the capital city of Punjab.
Regional factors are supposed to include similar activities in neigbouring Indian states on the one hand, and dust clouds emanating from countries in the Middle East on the other.
What has aggravated the problem is lack of preparedness on the part of the Punjab government. The province does not possess proper metering systems to record the pollution levels thus disabling policy makers to precisely identify the pollutants to formulate a proper response. Doubts have been expressed about the labs of the Environmental Protection Department (EPD) being fully operational. It is claimed that the Air Quality Index monitors which were installed at five points during the last decade were not subsequently calibrated and they eventually became useless.
There are indications that climate change is responsible for the prolongation of the dry season is also playing a role in the increasing intensity of the smog. The ministry of climate change is the most neglected of all federal portfolios. What is more it is run by a PML-N loyalist whose principal duty is to urgently respond to the opposition’s criticism of the government’s performance and defend the Prime Minister.