LUCKNOW, Nov. 11 -- A thick blanket of acrid smoke invaded living rooms and reduced midnight road visibility to a bare 200 metres on Sunday as unbridled firecracker bursting plunged Lucknow and much of Uttar Pradesh into a post-Diwali respiratory crisis. While winds offered the state capital a breather by Tuesday - bringing the Air Quality Index (AQI) down to a 'moderate' 172 - the preceding 48 hours left asthma patients gasping. "Lucknow witnessed a steady deterioration in air quality over a three-day period. Its average AQI, based on readings from six monitoring stations, rose from 207 on November 7 to 233 on Diwali (November 8) and further to 245 on Monday. PM2.5 was the prominent pollutant," an expert said analysing the CPCB data. On Tuesday (November 10), AQI in the state capital turned moderate at 172. AQI slipped to 233 on Diwali (November 8) and 245 the following day (November 9) - both were "poor" compared to last year's Diwali' AQI of 144, which was "moderate" followed by AQI 250 the following day, as per data from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). But last year Diwali fell on October 20, nearly three weeks earlier. Since 2015, Lucknow's air has been worse the day after Diwali than the day before it every year, according to the CPCB 4pm bulletins. In contrast (AQI.in), an open-source air quality monitoring platform created to provide real-time air pollution data and actionable health insight put Lucknow's AQI at 1697 as "hazardous" on Diwali night at 11:11pm and 1470 on the same date at midnight. Lucknowites claimed that the night sky turned smoky while visibility dropped significantly with haze all around. P2...