Open Green Shift 2026: Mapping a Sustainable Future
Delhi’s own numbers tell a more complicated story than Kant’s global arithmetic. Anumita Roychowdhury, Executive Director of CSE, told the panel ‘Can India Breathe Better?’ that the city’s pollution has actually fallen nearly 40 per cent over eight to nine years, which was a genuinely good thing. The catch is that the city still larger than just seasonal, and the toll on the health and wellbeing of Indians is immense. The problems are not singular, nor can they be fixed by simple changes either. Dr Anant Mohan, Head of Pulmonology at AIIMS, and environmentalist Sumaira Abdulali between them underscored just how varied the damage is, from lung disease to noise. The seasonality of Delhi’s pollution should not change how seriously people take it either, and for Mohan, an air purifier alone isn’t enough to fix the problem. He pushed back on the idea that a few clear-sky days mean the danger has passed. “A few better days doesn’t change the fact that exposure and its health effects are a continuous, ongoing process, not an occasional one,” he said. “You cannot stay indoors and air-purified all the time; over a day, whether exposure is one hour or 10, both intensity and duration of exposure matter.”