LAHORE: Monitoring through thermal drones has begun across Punjab, including Lahore, to make action against those spreading air pollution more effective, as the province moves into the weeks preceding its annual smog season.
With the help of thermal drones, sources of smoke and pollution will be identified directly. As soon as a drone traces the source of pollution, field teams will immediately reach the spot and take action.
During the past 24 hours, 243 industrial units were inspected across Punjab, including 28 units in Lahore.
In addition, 366 brick kilns were placed under strict monitoring across the province, while action against violators continues.
According to officials, suction hoods at 233 restaurants and food outlets were also checked in order to control smoke emissions and air pollution.
Conventional smog enforcement in Punjab has depended on physical inspection: teams visit a kiln, an industrial unit or a commercial kitchen, assess emissions visually or with hand-held equipment, and issue notices or seal the premises. The method is slow, easily anticipated, and limited by the number of inspectors available across a province of more than 120 million people.
Thermal imaging changes two things. It allows a heat signature to be detected from the air, which means an operating kiln or furnace can be identified even where access is blocked or the site is set back from a road. And it allows night-time detection, which matters because a significant share of unauthorised burning — of crop residue, industrial waste, tyres and plastic — takes place after dark specifically to avoid inspection.
Brick kilns remain the single most scrutinised category in Punjab’s smog policy. The province has for several seasons required conversion to zigzag technology, which improves combustion efficiency and reduces particulate emissions relative to conventional fixed-chimney kilns.
Restaurant suction hoods are the newest front, after 27 Lahore restaurants were sealed over missing suction hoods. Commercial charcoal and tandoor cooking releases fine particulate matter directly into the street at breathing height, and the requirement for functional extraction and filtration systems has become a standard condition of operation in the province’s larger cities.
As recorded in The Lahore Times‘ daily air quality readings, Lahore’s air quality typically deteriorates from late October, when falling temperatures and low wind speeds trap pollutants close to the ground, combining vehicular emissions, industrial output, brick kiln activity and crop residue burning into a persistent winter inversion.
The pre-season months are therefore the period in which enforcement has the greatest preventive value, since conversions, repairs and closures ordered now take effect before the inversion sets in. Officials say the inspection tempo will be sustained and that violators will continue to face action.
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