IT has been more than 15 years now that a thick blanket of foul fog has been enveloping large parts of the country in the winter months, disrupting flights, road and rail travel and the movement of goods, as well as causing numerous health issues. More than 30 flights have been diverted from landing at Lahore and Islamabad airports in the last 10 days, while the numbers for delayed departures and cancellations are far higher. Likewise, large sections of the motorway stretching from Peshawar to Faisalabad have been shut down on many days. Power lines start tripping due to elevated moisture levels, and recently a large-scale power blackout across Sindh, including the city of Karachi, was blamed on the tripping of a critical transmission line due to the fog. When a fire at the Sui gas field led to a weeklong outage of gas supplies during days when the mercury was hitting lows of four degrees Celsius, the deployment of repair teams was also severely hampered by the fog, causing long delays in the resumption of supplies. Health professionals report an increase in patient turnover of roughly 30pc in respiratory ailments as well as cardiac complications that they attribute to the fog.

For more than a decade and a half now, the fog has been crippling day-to-day life and the conduct of business every winter across a large swathe of the country. Yet to this day there is no concerted attention given to the problem from the highest levels of government, where the response is little more than a shrug and a prayer. Whatever efforts exist to understand the problem and cope with its consequences are being undertaken by individual government departments on their own initiative. The CAA has only recently proposed the installation of a Category 3 Instrument Landing System to maintain continuous flight operations through zero visibility, and the Motorway Police manage alternate routes during closures. Hospitals struggle to cope with the rise in patient turnover, while the meteorological department tries in vain to generate forecasts for the location, intensity and duration of the fog. Suparco has undertaken a study of its chemical composition, and identified elevated concentrations of ammonium sulphate in fog samples, a chemical compound produced by the burning of low-quality coal which they say is coming from across the border, where the problem is just as severe. But even that study was undertaken more than a decade after the foggy winters began, and does not conclusively establish whether the compound in question actually causes the fog.

On their own the governments of both India and Pakistan can do nothing to rid themselves of this menace. More can be done to help manage its impact. But to rid ourselves of this problem, concerted action is required from both countries, for which they must learn to work with each other.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2014