Basic requirement for growth: Fresh mind and healthy lungs

Pollution imposes substantial hidden costs through healthcare expenses, productivity losses, absenteeism, and premature mortality

- SRINATH SRIDHARAN

In many Indian cities today, especially the NCR, breathing has quietly become a calculated risk.

Citizens have become unwilling risk managers, checking pollution apps the way previous generations checked the weather. Parents plan school days around air quality, the elderly retreat indoors, and outdoor labour continues regardless of health cost.

Against this lived reality, parliamentarians’ assertions recently questioning the link between air quality and health are signals of how development is being perceived politically and whose well-being is considered expendable.

For a lower-middle-income economy that we are, such signals demand serious reflection. The institutional pillars of our democracy have not safeguarded the quality of everyday living, distracted by a politics that lurches from one urgency to the next. Governance increasingly resembles event management, public debate collapses into memes, and policy attention is consumed by the fear of missing the next headline. Development is promised in futures so distant that many citizens may never live to experience them, while the conditions of daily urban life steadily deteriorate.

Air pollution is a long-established public health challenge with extensive global and domestic evidence. Fine particulate matter, particularly PM2.5, is known to penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, aggravating respiratory and cardiovascular disease, reducing life expectancy and impairing childhood development. These relationships are neither novel nor speculative. They form the basis of environmental health policy in every major economy.