At Raja Vihar, a small colony in North Delhi, the morning air feels heavy as children walk their way to school through the solid, grey wall of smog. It looks like the wall is made of a thick, clammy substance — the kind that makes your throat itch and your eyes burn within minutes. The haze hangs heavy over cramped houses and narrow lanes where children once played freely. Today, many of them stay indoors, coughing and choking, rubbing their eyes, waiting for relief that never seems to come.
Across Delhi’s clumsy, informal settlements, toxic air is no longer a seasonal inconvenience. It has become a daily public health emergency — one that is quietly reshaping childhoods.
11-year-old Ayaan (name changed) from Raja Vihar was a live wire — always known to be full of energy, busy with playing gully cricket, racing with friends, doing quick errands for his mother. Movement was his second nature. Then came the cough. What began as a mild fever quickly escalated into violent coughing bouts so severe that he stopped playing completely.
“He was never so sick before,” his mother says, her voice strained with worry. “Now, even sleeping is difficult. He coughs till he can’t breathe.”
Doctors diagnosed a respiratory infection — pretty common during Delhi’s pollution peaks. The timing was telling: Ayaan’s symptoms began just as the city’s Air Quality Index slipped into the ‘severe’ category.
Little did his parents know that for children whose lungs are still developing, prolonged exposure to PM2.5 and PM10 particles can cause serious damage that lasts a lifetime. The scale and magnitude of the problem is evident as the Mohalla Clinics and Hospitals report attending increasing number of children ailing from chest infections, and over-the-counter sales of anti-allergic medicines and cough syrups skyrocketing yielding little result.
In the same Raja Vihar Colony, the 12-year-old Ritika (name changed) rarely steps outside her home anymore. A student of eighth standard who wanted to continue her studies with science, she had to drop out last year due to financial struggle at home. Yet, even within four walls, there was no escape.
“My eyes feel like they are burning all the time,” she says, while cooking meals on a kerosene stove in the poorly ventilated kitchen with smoke soot clings to the walls. Outside, dust and exhaust fumes thicken the air. Ritika’s recurring fever and burning eyes are signs of chronic exposure to toxic air — both indoors and out.
The story of Arjun (name changed), a seven-year-old at Suraj Park in the North-West of Delhi, is no different. When he first complained about his swollen eyes a couple of months back, his parents thought it was a passing discomfort. They got him eye drops, but with no result. Doctors eventually diagnosed allergic conjunctivitis, aggravated by pollution.
Together, these forces weaken immunity, damage developing lungs, and turn minor illnesses into prolonged battles for survival. Doctors warn that children breathe faster than adults and inhale a higher volume of pollutants relative to their body weight. In Delhi, this has led to alarming outcomes — irreversible lung damage, rising asthma cases, stunted growth, and even cognitive and behavioural impacts.
A growing body of many evidence-based researches suggest that air pollution is one among the most important risk factors both globally and nationally, when it comes to falling prey to cardiovascular diseases and severe respiratory infections.
Analysing the global scenario of environment-related health risks, a recent report published by the Lancet Commission on Health and Pollution has shown that globally an estimated 9 million deaths occur each year due to air, water, and chemical exposures. Air pollution is at the top of the list, with outdoor and indoor air pollution contributing the lion’s share — close to 6 million deaths. According to the report, India remains one of the worst affected where 1.9 million premature deaths occur due to outdoor and indoor air pollution.
Back in India, experts under the aegis of the Indian Council of Medical Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare recently released a study that observes the fact that air pollution remains the second most important risk factor nationally.
Children like Ayaan, Ritika and Arjun, and many more like them, live under what experts describe as a “triple burden of exposure” — comprising of ambient air pollution from vehicles, industries, indiscriminate construction work and waste burning; household pollution caused by incomplete combustion of cooking fuels like kerosene; and structural vulnerability caused by overcrowded, poorly ventilated housing.
It should also be kept in mind that the triple burden is often added with the fourth one — the socio-economic factor. CRY’s on-ground experience suggests that children within the low-income families often suffer more from environment-related diseases. As affording protective measures or accessing quality medical care remain out of reach, the fall-out showcases worrying impacts created by a strong socio-economic divide. To put it bluntly, breathing fresh air becomes a privilege that depends on the financial well-being of a family, and not something a child enjoys as her right.
Delhi’s air pollution crisis is often framed as an unfortunate seasonal reality — nothing beyond just an annual hazard families must learn to manage through masks, purifiers, temporary closure of schools and confining children at home. But one may argue that shifting the burden of survival onto parents and children can never take us to a sustainable solution path. Leaving the entire child population — one-third of the total population of India — completely at the mercy of toxic air with ever-worsening Air Quality Index is simply not a way that leads us to a healthy nation roaring toward inclusive growth.
Article 21 of the Indian Constitution has been repeatedly interpreted to include the right to a clean and healthy environment. Even though the right to a clean environment, including pollution-free water and air, is not explicitly mentioned in the Indian Constitution, it has been judicially read into the “Right to Life” under Article 21 through progressive Supreme Court interpretations. In Subhash Kumar vs. the State of Bihar case (1991), the Apex Court ruled that the right to life includes the right to pollution-free water and air. Similarly, in M.C. Mehta vs. the Union of India case (1987) the Supreme Court had recognised the right to live in a pollution-free environment as a fundamental right.
For children, this obligation is even stronger — reinforced by India’s commitments under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees every child the right to the highest attainable standard of health.
Yet, in practice, the response to toxic air remains reactive and passive, rather than preventive and proactive. Emergency measures — odd-even schemes, construction bans or temporary school closures arrive only after pollution levels spiral out of control. These interventions may reduce exposure for a few days, but they do little to address the structural sources of pollution that choke the city year after year.
And mind you, this is not just a menace faced only by the Delhi kids. The scenario is more or less the same across the whole of India.
This means prioritising pollution hotspots where vulnerable communities live, regulating waste burning, manage construction waste and industrial emissions with consistency rather than leniency, and ensuring clean cooking fuels, proper ventilation, and accessible primary healthcare in informal settlements. It also means recognising air pollution as a public health emergency — not merely an environmental concern — and planning accordingly.
Expecting low-income families to buy air purifiers, N95 masks, affording a vacation to cleaner venues or accessing specialised nutrition is neither realistic, nor just. Protection cannot be a privilege reserved for those who can afford it. When children are forced to stay indoors for weeks, miss school, fall ill repeatedly, or suffer permanent lung damage, the cost of inaction (or insufficient action) is being paid with their futures.
For thousands of children in Delhi, the expectations of childhood have quietly shrunk. Playing outdoors or attending school without falling sick are no longer taken for granted. Illness, confinement, and missed classrooms have become routine.
When children are advised to stay indoors for weeks because the air is unsafe, and when irreversible damage to young lungs becomes an accepted risk of growing up in the capital, the crisis ceases to be environmental. It becomes ethical.
As the new year begins, there are no ambitious demands to make. Only a simple, urgent expectation remains — that our children be guaranteed something as basic as a little fresh air to breathe.
Soha Moitra is Director of Programmes, CRY – Child Rights and You
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth