LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) has issued a final judgement in an eight-year-long public interest litigation on smog and environmental degradation in Punjab, reaffirming its directions and achievement during the marathon proceedings.
Justice Shahid Karim, the judgement’s author, described it as the “last judgement in the trilogy,” following two earlier reported rulings in 2023 and 2025 arising from the same continuing proceedings.
Justice Karim, who is reaching superannuation on Aug 19, started his judgement with the final song in the play Hamilton – “Legacy, what is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.”
The judge noted that the judgement culminated the extraordinary and seminal work accomplished in a novel and paradigmatic form through the device of judicial review of public actions.
Justice Karim starts final judgement with a song, ends it with a poem; enumerates achievements led by court’s intervention
“It does not mean that the goal has been accomplished. Far from it. Yet it sets the tone for future actions and lays the groundwork for building resilience and adaptation policies,” he added.
Justice Karim said, during the course of proceedings, governments had come on board (though reluctantly at times) and pursued policies based on the decisions of the court.
He observed: “A robust culture of decision-making has been developed with environment and water conservation at its heart”.
According to Justice Karim, there had been a critical interrogation of the court’s authority to continue proceedings unabated for more than eight years. Key directions and their compliance reaffirmed and consolidated in the judgement include smog as a calamity. On the court’s directions, smog was formally declared a calamity, with the Punjab Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) tasked with leading a dedicated control room for enforcement during the smog season. Every operational brick kiln in Punjab has been converted to zigzag technology to cut emissions and each kiln has been assigned a unique identification number for digital monitoring by the Environment Protection Agency.
About stubble burning,the court raised penalties for stubble burning violations to Rs200,000 per acre after finding some districts were imposing fines as low as Rs50,000, and directed uniform enforcement across all deputy commissioners’ offices. For school transport, private schools had been directed to arrange buses or vans for at least 50pc of their students as a condition for registration renewal, to be implemented in phases.
Regarding water conservation, amendments were made to LDA Building and Zoning Regulations making rainwater harvesting mandatory for new construction, and Gray Water Treatment Plants compulsory for all new commercial and residential building plans, with no building approvals to be granted without compliance. According to the judgement, 563 service stations across Lahore now operate water recycling plants, cutting fresh water use per car wash by roughly 70 percent (from 400 litres to about 120 litres). Ablution water recycling tanks have been installed at over 194 mosques, including a 60,000–70,000-gallon facility at Data Darbar.
About groundwater conservation, in compliance with the court’s orders, Wasa Lahore collected over Rs3.35bn in aquifer charges from bulk groundwater users since 2018. Separately, 117 recharge wells have been installed across Lahore, while rainwater storage tanks — including a 4-million-gallon facility at Gaddafi Stadium — have been built to combat flooding and recharge aquifers.
The court barred playgrounds and open spaces — including at institutions such as MAO College — from being used for weddings or commercial events and directed authorities, including DHA, LDA and the School Education Department, to protect and maintain green cover.
The judgement also references two related rulings — the 2023 quashing of the Lahore Division Master Plan 2050 for violating LDA Master Plan Rules, and the striking down of land acquisition for a Gujrat Divisional Complex that would have required felling over 594 kanals of forest land — both cited as major environmental victories achieved through the same broader litigation.
In his concluding remarks, Justice Karim paid tribute to the Judicial Water and Environment Commission’s members — retired Justice Ali Akbar Qureshi, Syed Kamal Ali Haider, Hina Hafeezullah Ishaq, and Ch Zulfiqar Ali — who served pro bono throughout the proceedings. The judge recommended that they and several government officers involved in implementation of the court’s directions be considered for civil awards.
The judge disposed of the main petition filed by Haroon Farooq in 2018 along with a dozen of petitions that subsequently landed in the court concerning water and environmental issues.
Justice Karim concluded the judgement with Amanda Gorman‘s poem: “Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is time, that even as we grieved, we grew, that even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried.”
Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2026
