| Friday, 31 January 2025 |
An abridged, narrative version of the latest episode of Two by Two, The Ken’s premium weekly business podcast Subscribe here
Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
There’s a scene in Rahul Jain’s 2021 documentary Invisible Demons that really rattles me. It’s nighttime in Delhi, and the filmmaker is out on a National Highway. With his camera, he captures the tiny airborne particles that people in Delhi inhale with every breath of air. The specks fill the frame.
We have always known the causes of air pollution in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and Delhi has been at the epicentre of this story for more than a decade. Most readers and listeners are also cognisant of the attempts to bring it down to permissible levels, yet the worst-affected regions remain smoggy.
In this week’s episode of Two by Two, we decided to look at this critical issue—a “wicked problem”, as one of our hosts called it.
A “wicked problem” is a complex social or cultural issue that is extremely difficult to solve due to its interconnected nature, lack of clear definition, multiple perspectives, and the absence of a definitive solution.
Hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan were joined by an excellent panel of guests who didn’t hold back when they shared their thoughts and opinions. There was Alok Mittal, co-founder of Indifi, a fintech enabling lending for SMEs; Roshan Shankar, founder and CEO of Saroja Earth, an institution that creates and scales market solutions to reduce air pollution through strategic R&D, open policy advocacy, and grassroots work; and Mohit Beotra, co-founder of the Air Pollution Action Group (A-PAG), an organisation established in 2019 to clean up India’s air.
Our panel reflected the many different types of people who need to come together to clear the haze over India.
Roshan: Alok is the first step. He’s the education part. I am the agitation bit, and Mohit is the organisation bit.
So if that’s Ambedkar’s triumvirate of change, you need to first educate people, I will agitate them, and Mohit will organise us to do something useful out of it.
We’ll add this: Two by Two is the platform where their voices are heard.
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You can also listen to the 10-minute trailer version of this episode here if you want to get a sense of what we discussed:
Step 1: Educate
Many people comprehend air pollution as an abstract problem—one that they encounter in their daily lives but don’t measure precisely. To convince people to do more than acknowledge the existence of a problem and actually take action, the message has to be more intense than the air’s really bad today.
By tracking the relevant data and giving it quantitative resolution, the issue’s gravity becomes much clearer.
Alok: I think that one of the things that we need to do is to make granular monitoring of air pollution available on an open platform, where I can see the difference from my home versus half a kilometre away.
Today, the pollution data that we get is based on very few sensors. Delhi has fewer than 40, and we are interpolating from all of those sensors to kind of create a granular map, but that granularity of data doesn’t exist.
Alok’s point rings true. This article from The New Indian Express sheds light on how the location of the sensors is also key when calculating the Air Quality Index, or AQI.
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