Am back home after a small break. And no—what hit me was not the traffic chaos, the cows on the road or the relentless honking. It was the air.
We Indians do not need an AQI app to tell us that something is wrong. A heaviness in the chest, a faint burn in the throat. By evening, the exhaustion felt unnatural—deeper, harder to explain. This was not jet lag. It was pollution. Soon, I was down with a bad infection.
And that is the real horror: how inevitable we have allowed this to become.
Poisoned air has become background noise. We cough, we wheeze, we feel breathless—and we move on. We discuss AQI numbers the way we discuss the weather. “It’s bad today.” “Severe tomorrow.” “Avoid morning walks.” Then we carry on, as if this is a reasonable way to live.
For years, I held a naive belief that the Union Budget reflects national priorities. That what truly matters to a country will be visible in where it chooses to spend its money.
This year’s Budget finally shattered that illusion.
Air pollution barely featured in Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s speech. Worse, the allocation to tackle pollution in 2026–27 has been cut—to ₹1,091 crore from ₹1,300 crore last year. This is not oversight. It is a statement.
And the statement is clear: choking Indians are not a priority.
This comes at a time when polluted air is no longer a Delhi problem. It is an Indian problem. From Ahmedabad to Lucknow, from Kanpur to Patna, from Gurugram to countless smaller towns, the air is becoming steadily more toxic. Delhi may still grab the headlines, but it is no longer an outlier—it is a warning.
Yes, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has received a modest increase—from ₹3,481.61 crore to ₹3,759.46 crore. An 8% rise sounds respectable until you place it against reality: longer heatwaves, collapsing monsoons, floods, droughts, and air that is actively shortening lives.
Some institutions have seen higher allocations—the National Green Tribunal, the Zoological and Botanical Surveys of India, the National Mission for a Green India. All necessary. All welcome. But all utterly inadequate when millions of people are breathing air that damages their lungs, hearts and brains every single day.
Our approach? It is not resilience. It is quiet surrender.
What is even more disturbing than the damage to our bodies is the moral collapse behind it. We, the silent Upper middle class and middle class seem to have decided—collectively, silently—that this is acceptable. That poisoned air is the price of growth. That some illness, some suffering, some premature death is inevitable.
It is not inevitable. It is chosen.
At Davos, IMF economist Gita Gopinath made an observation that should have dominated headlines in India: pollution poses a bigger threat to India’s economy than tariffs. Bigger than trade wars. Bigger than external shocks.
She is right. Pollution erodes productivity, drives up healthcare costs, shortens working lives, and makes cities unlivable for talent and investment. No tariff can inflict damage so quietly and so relentlessly.
Yet we remain obsessed with GDP rankings and economic chest-thumping.
India wants to be a global power. But do global powers gas their own citizens?
So let us stop pretending everything is fine.
Let us stop blindly chasing infrastructure projects as if flyovers can compensate for poisoned lungs. Let us stop measuring progress in kilometres of concrete while ignoring what is happening beneath it.
Do we really need more overbridges if we cannot breathe under them?
Let us have fewer hoardings—those giant faces of ministers and religious leaders smiling down at us as they inaugurate yet another project. Fewer ceremonies. Fewer ribbons. Less self-congratulation.
And let us ask the question no one wants to ask: do we really need more temples, churches, gurdwaras and mosques right now, when the air itself has become hostile to life? Faith matters. Belief matters. But breath comes first.
Our AQI numbers have become a dark joke. We say “300” and “400” as if they are just numbers. But the joke is not the AQI.
The joke is on us—on our silence, our compliance, our willingness to accept a life where breathing itself has become a health risk.
Also Read: Food, Faith and Fascism in New India https://www.vibesofindia.com/food-faith-and-fascism-in-new-india/
