CNN
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Thick, toxic smog has once again enveloped the north India and to the east Pakistan just days before the start of Diwali, a Hindu festival typically celebrated with fireworks that cause air quality to plummet each year.

The air quality index in the Indian capital of Delhi was around 250 Monday morning, after days in the “very unhealthy” zone above 200, according to IQAir, which tracks global air quality.

In the Pakistani city of LahoreAbout 25 kilometers from the Indian border, air quality on Monday exceeded the “hazardous” value of 500 – almost 65 times the World Health Organization’s guidelines for healthy air – making it the most polluted city in the world at the time of the epidemic. ranking, according to IQAir.

Air quality in the region is expected to deteriorate as the winter smog season approaches, when an ominous yellow haze blankets the sky due to farmers burning agricultural waste, coal-fired power plants, traffic and windless winter days.

Diwalithe Hindu festival of lights, is set to begin on Thursday – a five-day celebration during which people gather with their families, feast and set off firecrackers, in some cases in defiance of local bansfurther aggravating air pollution.

Dystopian scenes of orange haze and fog-shrouded buildings appear every year as smog season dominates the news, raising alarms as doctors warn of the risk of respiratory illnesses and their impacts on the life expectancy. Air pollution in India has been found to be so severe that experts have warned Smog could cost hundreds of millions of people years.

Residents and experts have long wondered why India has failed to reduce air pollution, while Delhi and its neighboring states wonder who is really to blame.

Delhi had banned the use and sale of firecrackers before Diwali, but the policy was difficult to implement.

Last week, India’s Supreme Court condemned the state governments of Punjab and Haryana for failing to crack down on illegal stubble burning, a practice in which farmers set fire to agricultural waste to clear fields. Local authorities say they have significantly reduced the practice in recent years.

The Indian government also launched its National Clean Air Program in 2019, paving the way for strategies in 24 states and union territories to reduce the concentration of particulate matter, a term for air pollutants, by 40%. by 2026. The measures include a crackdown on coal-based power plants. plants, implementing air monitoring systems and banning the burning of biomass.

Authorities have also started watering roads and even causing artificial rainfall to combat air pollution in the Indian capital, although experts say these are band-aid solutions that fail to address resolve underlying issues.

Some Indian cities have seen improvements in their air quality, government data shows, but progress has been slow.

Between 2018 and 2022, the average concentration of PM2.5 (a measure of pollutants in the air) in New Delhi for the month of November, when the pollution season usually begins, remained more or less the same, according to IQAir .

In the past, experts have questioned whether India has the political will to tackle pollution.

“There is not a single party that has put its head down and said, ‘We are making the whole country sick and let’s fix the problem,'” Jyoti Pande Lavakare, founder of the non-profit organization Care for Air.