India’s Economic Survey 2025-26 presents air pollution primarily as a regulatory and compliance challenge, rather than a public-health emergency.
While highlighting platforms, audits and emissions trading, the survey gives limited attention to unequal exposure and long-term health harm.
Treating pollution as an economic externality risks protecting processes and markets more than the people most affected by toxic air.
When Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tabled the Economic Survey in Parliament on January 29, 2026, she presented what is, on paper, an annual stocktake of the economy. In practice, the survey does something more consequential. It signals what the state believes is urgent, what it considers urgent, solvable, and worth designing institutions around.
By any serious public-health yardstick, air pollution should rank near the very top of that urgency list. Globally, air pollution was linked to 7.9 million deaths in 2023, according to the State of Global Air platform. Much of this harm now shows up not as sudden illness, but as long-term, chronic disease. In India, World Bank estimates put the toll at 1.67 million deaths attributable to air pollution in 2019, alongside substantial economic losses from premature deaths and morbidity.
And yet, the most striking feature of the survey is not what it says about air pollution, but how it frames the problem. The government’s core air-pollution narrative is presented as one of environmental governance: a matter of compliance systems, monitoring architecture and market instruments.
What is far less explicit is a public-health framing that recognises air pollution as a mass risk factor that shortens lives unevenly, shaped by class, caste and geography.
The survey highlights PARIVESH 3.0, a revamped single-window platform for environmental clearances, presenting it as a way to streamline approvals while strengthening post-clearance compliance tracking.
It also points to the Environment Audit Rules, 2025, which introduce certified third-party environmental auditors across major environmental laws. The signal here is clear: a move towards outsourced verification and standardised compliance checks.
None of this is trivial. India’s pollution-control framework often fails not because laws are missing, but because enforcement is thin, uneven and constrained by limited capacity. The survey itself acknowledges that monitoring and enforcement are particularly challenging in developing-country settings.
So yes, better data systems and audit mechanisms matter. The survey even concedes where the real bottlenecks lie: weak post-clearance monitoring, stretched State Pollution Control Boards, and uncertainty created by litigation.
But these reforms also reveal the survey’s underlying theory of change: fix the machinery of compliance, and cleaner air will follow. But is that enough?
The survey’s most concrete air pollution evidence is its push towards Emissions Trading System and that is precisely the issue.
It moves from process to evidence when it points to an emissions trading scheme (ETS) for particulate matter in Surat. It reports 20-30 per cent lower emissions and 11-14 per cent lower abatement costs among participating plants.
This is precisely why ETS deserves closer scrutiny, not applause. Emissions trading turns pollution into a purchasable commodity. In doing so, it rewards those with the ability to pay, rather than those who bear the burden.
In practice, the firms with deeper pockets and better legal capacity can buy their way into continued pollution, while low-income neighbourhoods, who cannot bid for clean air, remain exposed. Even where an ETS reduces emissions on average, it can still entrench inequality by allowing hotspots to persist. Where monitoring and enforcement are weak, such schemes can also become little more than paper markets.
The result is a policy tool that often protects balance sheets more reliably than it protects lungs.
Clean air is not a tradable privilege; it is a public right, and rights cannot be auctioned.
The survey’s chapter on education and health notes India’s epidemiological transition, with non-communicable diseases now accounting for over 57 per cent of deaths. It also acknowledges regional and socioeconomic disparities, and includes respiratory infections and diseases in cause-of-death accounting.
What it does not do is connect the dots. Ambient air pollution is one of the major upstream risk multipliers for cardio-respiratory disease, and its exposure is not neutral. Who lives near busy roads, industrial clusters, waste-burning sites or dust-heavy construction zones determines who bears the risk, and that distinction should change policy posture.
When air pollution is treated mainly as a compliance variable, solutions gravitate towards dashboards, platforms, audits and trading pilots. When it is treated as a public-health emergency, priorities shift towards time-bound exposure reduction, neighbourhood-level targeting, and resource allocation that explicitly protects those who cannot buy their way out of toxic air.
Air pollution exposure and environmental justice is not an add-on, it changes what effective policy looks like.
It is an environmental-justice problem because exposure and vulnerability stack on existing inequities. Market based tools like ETS are built on a capitalist agenda and do not necessarily ensure environmental justice unless explicitly codified:
Exposure safeguards, not only emissions averages: Trading should not permit persistent hotspots near overburdened communities.
Non-negotiable monitoring integrity: If enforcement is weak (a constraint the survey itself flags), market instruments can become performative.
Directed benefits: Where trading or pricing generates public value, the gains should fund monitoring networks, mitigation, and health protection in high-risk areas first.
Experience from programmes such as California’s cap-and-trade system and AB 617 illustrates why markets do not deliver justice unless justice is written into the rules.
The Economic Survey 2025-26 does not deny air pollution; it simply places it in a box — an environmental governance and compliance problem to be managed, rather than a health catastrophe with unequal victims demanding an emergency-grade, justice-first response.
It is almost comical that the survey can devote an entire chapter to artificial intelligence, with a roadmap and institutional pathway, while air pollution, one of India’s most pervasive public-health risks, is left to interpretation.
The survey’s treatment of air pollution is underlining the key problem: It frames air pollution primarily as an economic externality, a side-effect of growth to be priced, monitored, and managed, rather than as a core public-health crisis that should anchor policy priorities. In the urban context, pollution appears alongside congestion costs and fuel waste as part of the external costs that congestion pricing can internalise, with the promise that traffic management can cut emissions.
In the environment context, the emphasis similarly tilts toward compliance architecture and instruments like platforms, audits, and market mechanisms, implicitly treating air quality as a variable that improves when the machinery of regulation is strengthened.
If the survey is serious about resilience and productivity, the next step is not just faster clearances or more audits. It is to treat clean air as life-saving infrastructure, and to measure success in the only metric that matters: reduced exposure where the risk is highest, not improved process where the paperwork is easiest.