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Pakistan’s most populated province of Punjab on Friday extended school closures in smog-hit major cities by a week and India shut all primary schools in its capital Delhi on Thursday night as young pupils are particularly vulnerable to smog-related ailments due to their age.

Punjab, home to more than half of Pakistan’s 240 million people, last week closed all schools until November 17 in major cities enveloped by smog.

Air quality in Lahore was deemed ‘hazardous’, according to data by IQAir, with  the concentration of deadly PM2.5 pollutants — fine particulate matter in the air that causes the most damage to health — around 30 times the level deemed acceptable by the World Health Organisation.

‘Schools will remain closed for another week due to the hazardous air quality. Institutes, including universities, would switch to online classes to ensure the safety of students,’ Marriyum Aurangzeb, Punjab’s environment minister, told a news conference.

Children are often hardest hit, with UNICEF noting that ‘prior to these record-breaking levels of air pollution, about 12 per cent of deaths in children under five in Pakistan were due to air pollution’.

Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution in winter.

‘I have an eight-year-old kid and he has been suffering from a cough the past couple of days,’ Delhi resident Satraj, who did not give his surname, said on the streets of the capital.

‘The government did the right thing by shutting down schools,’ he added.

Thursday’s edict instructed schools to conduct online classes, banned construction work, ordered drivers of older diesel-powered vehicles to stay off the streets and directed water trucks to spray roads in a bid to clear dust particles from the air.

Breathing the toxic air has catastrophic health consequences, with the WHO saying strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory diseases can be triggered by prolonged exposure.

‘More than 35,000 patients have been reported in the hospitals of Lahore due to smog-related health issues in almost a month,’ Punjab’s environment minister said.

Government offices and private companies had half their staff work from home this week.

Aurangzeb also urged residents on Friday to ‘stop driving motorbikes and cars and to wear masks’.

Indian critics have consistently said that authorities have fallen short in their duty to tackle a crisis that blights the city each year.

‘We haven’t responded to the emergency with the same intensity with which we are facing this crisis,’ Sunil Dahiya of New Delhi-based advocacy group Envirocatalysts said.

The acrid smog over New Delhi each year is primarily blamed on stubble burning by farmers in nearby states to clear their fields for ploughing.

A report by broadcaster NDTV on Friday said that more than 7,000 individual farm fires had been recorded in Punjab state, to the capital’s north.

Emissions from industry and numerous coal-fired power stations ringing the city, along with vehicle exhaust and the burning of household waste, also play a part.

‘Since we haven’t yet carried out any systemic long-term changes, like the way we commute, generate power, or manage our waste, even the curtailed emissions will be high,’ Dahiya said.