Every Sunday morning for the past twelve years, a stretch of road in Gurugram that carries cars the rest of the week has been handed back to people walking and cycling. What I find most instructive about Raahgiri Day is not the crowd size but how quickly the air changes simply because a few thousand trips that morning were made differently. It is a small, repeatable demonstration of something our cities have been slow to accept.

Air quality is produced by ordinary design decisions about streets, buses, and land, not only by emergency measures taken when the season changes.

Today is the seventh edition of the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies. This year’s theme, Clean Air for Climate Action, is based on a new assessment by UNEP and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition that calculates the costs of 25 measures positively affecting both air quality and climate. It also provides a figure for the health and productivity benefits they generate. India has more reason than most to take this assessment seriously.

According to the Global Burden of Disease study, output losses in India caused by air pollution amounted to $36.8 billion in 2019, about 1.36% of GDP. Delhi had the highest per-capita economic loss of all states and union territories, with Haryana second. The Clean Air Fund and the Confederation of Indian Industry estimate the annual cost to Indian business at around $95 billion, nearly 3% of GDP.

Although clean air is currently presented only as a matter of pollution control, budget arguments favouring visible infrastructure continue to prevail. If it is described for what it really is—a matter of productivity, public health, and competitiveness—then it becomes an issue in which both finance and planning departments have a direct interest. This is the kind of framing we should adopt today.

The good news is that India has many policies. The National Clean Air Programme includes 131 cities, each with a city-level action plan. GRAP provides the National Capital Region with a graded response. The FAME and state EV policies have advanced the shift towards electric vehicles.

The Smart Cities Mission has equipped several cities with command centres and monitoring equipment. Nearly Rs 19,614 crore has been allocated under NCAP and air quality grants from the Fifteenth Finance Commission for 2019–20 to 2025–26, of which about Rs 11,211 crore has already been released. The challenge now is not to create a new scheme but to bring together what already exists so the various departments stop working at cross-purposes.

Mobility is the largest lever a city government controls. Every kilometre shifted from a private vehicle to a bus, footpath, or cycle is a direct and measurable air quality gain. Unlike most interventions in this sector, it pays back in months rather than years.

Raahgiri Day and the........

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