AFTER a three-month summer break, Lahore’s school gates officially reopened on Aug 24, bringing back the hurried footsteps of children racing to beat the morning bell and bursts of laughter as they spill through the school gates in the afternoon. With them have come pickups and rickshaws, bulging with children and their oversized schoolbags, motorcycles weaving through traffic, often carrying three or more students at a time, and cars — so many cars — streaming across the city, sometimes carrying just one child. Buses carrying 20 or more children, meanwhile, are a rare sight.
Undoubtedly, beneath the bustle of the daily school run lies the palpable innocence of childhood — as well as the uneasy reality of the world they are growing up in. The cars, motorcycles and rickshaws ferrying children to and from school add to smoke that, come autumn, will mingle with dust, and turn the skies grey with smog.
To mitigate the harm of the annual smog, the Punjab government announced the Pre-Smog Action Plan 2026 (July-September 2026), to “ensure timely preparedness, prevention and mitigation of smog during the upcoming smog season”. Broadly, and rightly, the action plan calls for stronger Environment Protection Agency monitoring, drone surveillance and activation of district anti-smog committees, alongside weekly coordination among relevant departments. It requires calibration of air quality monitors and emission testing stations, inspections of industries and brick kilns, and checks on construction sites and stone crushers. Transport measures include vehicle testing and action against vehicles emitting black smoke, among other critical measures.
The plan largely carries forward the 10-year smog policy launched in 2024. To be fair, Lahore’s pollution levels were lower in 2025 than before — although favourable weather conditions had a hand in that improvement. But it is time to discuss measures that have escaped the smog plan’s purview so far — starting with the school traffic system.
Lahore must revamp its school transport system.
Lahore needs a transport system that puts hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren on far fewer vehicles. The government has attempted this, at its familiar slow pace, but only after pressure from the courts.
In an Aug 13, 2026, judgement, Justice Shahid Karim of the Lahore High Court (LHC) noted that vehicular emissions account for 45 per cent of Lahore’s pollution, thus getting children into buses is about cutting emissions that contribute to dangerous smog. Justice Karim described the order as the “last judgement in the trilogy”, which arose from a petition filed in 2018 regarding environmental degradation in Punjab.
Over eight years of proceedings, school transport became one strand of the case. The provincial government was directed to press schoolsto shift children from private vehicles to buses, to ensure buses for at least half the students, and to make transport compliance a condition of school registration.
All these years, the government’s response to the court’s order has largely consisted of meetings with school administrations and associations, followed by letters urging compliance. It has been a token effort — for, the government has not pushed hard enough to persuade private schools to set aside their claims of limited resources and invest in buses. Off the record, private school officials say the government sends letters and raises school transport in meetings, but no one seriously expects anything to come of it.
Lahore has hardly been a city of school buses. Since the mid-2000s, school transport has been shadowed by security concerns. During the years of the ‘war on terror’, when schools were conspicuous targets, parents saw buses carrying many children as a security risk. Then, in 2016, came a spate of reported child abductions across Punjab. In August that year, the then LHC chief justice Mansoor Ali Shah ordered schools to deploy security guards in pick-and-drop vans and directed the police to monitor school transport.
The fear was not confined to kidnapping. The rape and murder of Zainab Ansari in Kasur in 2018 intensified a wider anxiety about children’s vulnerability — and about the adults entrusted with their care. Then there was the danger posed by the vehicles themselves, with children often sharing space with unsafe gas cylinders.
To say that those fears have disappeared would be incorrect. They persist. And the urgency to overcome them has grown. The number of vehicles making the journey twice a day must be reduced. The stress on educating children rings hollow if the air they inhale is dangerous to their health. The best solution, of course, is a public school bus system — unless schools are brought within walking distance of every child.
The writer is a freelance journalist based in Lahore.
Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2026
