India: Life Inside Delhi's 'Airpocalypse'

In Delhi, lung cancer is no longer a smoker’s disease. It’s a breather’s disease.

But the most polluted capital on earth sits in a country running five years ahead of its Paris clean power target.

In the first of three dispatches from India, Tom Rivett-Carnac is joined by Dia Mirza, one of the biggest names in Indian cinema and a UN Environment Goodwill Ambassador, and Shyla Raghav, formerly Chief Climate Officer at TIME, who describes "a mix of pride, a mix of heartbreak, and, as well, possibility."

With Delhi-based journalist Adnan Bhat guiding and translating, Tom traces the path India is trying to build - development founded on renewable energy, clean transport, and a refusal to accept that getting richer has to cost the earth.

We meet Bhavreen Kandhari, who stopped relying on the government's air quality figures and started keeping her own. Now, she says, every citizen is a scientist. On a good day, indoors, her monitor reads six times the safe limit.

And, Dr Arvind Kumar, who has been operating on Delhi's lungs since the 1980s. Here, he says, “a child becomes a smoker from the first breath.” But he has yet to see dirty air written onto a death certificate in India.

And in Old Delhi, Bilkis drives a lavender electric rickshaw. She switched because it was cheaper and easier to drive, she says. Which may be how this actually gets done.

Can India grow, bring a fifth of humanity with it, and build a better road than the one the West took and then closed behind it?

Learn More

🌍 Read IQAir's World Air Quality Report, which has ranked New Delhi the world's most polluted capital for eight years running

📈 Understand what air pollution costs India on the Lancet Countdown's India data sheet

👩‍👧 Explore Warrior Moms, the network Bhavreen Kandhari co-founded in 2020, now 38,000 mothers across 19 states, with guides on filing air quality RTIs and writing to your MLA

🩺 Learn more about the Lung Care Foundation, set up by Dr Arvind Kumar after black deposits started appearing in the lungs of patients who had never smoked

⚖️ Read about Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, the first person anywhere to have air pollution recorded as a cause of death, the precedent Dr Kumar wants India to follow

🛺 Get up to date on Delhi's switch to electric autos, under which only electric three-wheelers can be newly registered in the city from January 2027

⚡ See how India passed 50% non-fossil power capacity in July 2025, five years ahead of the target it set under the Paris Agreement

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Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

India Producer and translator: Adnan Bhat

Show Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan

Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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