On 22 October 2026, Lahore stood among the three most polluted major cities in the world on IQAir's live ranking, with an air quality index of 258, in the "very unhealthy" band. Nothing about that day was unusual. It was the ordinary air of a city of many millions, where children walk to school and grandparents sit outside in the evening, and where hardly anyone is told that the haze they breathe is, by the World Health Organization's yardstick, an emergency. I write this with sorrow rather than anger, and with a request to those who lend and advise: the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations and UNDP. Lahore's air has not improved while large sums have been committed in the name of clean air, and the people who will repay those sums are the people who breathe it.

A ten-year record of monthly fine-particle pollution, PM2.5, from January 2016 to September 2026 tells the story plainly. Summers are tolerable, winters are brutal, and the winters are not getting better. November 2024 reached 290 micrograms per cubic metre, nearly sixty times the WHO annual guideline of 5. Not one of the 129 months in the record met that guideline. In the October to December season, the one that matters most for health, the 2025 average was 14.8 percent higher than in 2016. On IQAir's own published annual figures, 2025 (88.9) is no better than 2019 (89.5). The one large fall came in 2020, when a lockdown emptied the roads and closed the factories. The annual figure dropped by about a quarter, and within four years it had climbed back above where it began. A national shutdown did more than any scheme, and it showed how much of Lahore's air is made by human activity and how quickly relief........

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