The City and I: From punya nagari to polluted skies, Pune’s promise now feels forsaken

There was a time when I traveled from Mumbai to Pune not just for work, but for relief — for the air, the calm, and the clarity of thought that only a hill-nested city provides. These days, I find myself rationing those trips. It’s not that Pune lacks its signature cafés or vibrant culture; it’s that the city now leaves behind a distinct brain fog, irritated eyes, and a dull fatigue that a city in the Sahyadris was never meant to induce.

Except for a brief hiatus, I grew up largely in tranquil settlements tucked in the Eastern Ghats. Clean air was never a topic of conversation because it simply existed. We fed sparrows, watching kites drift across an endless blue every Sankranti.

Today, those memories feel endangered. The sparrows are gone. Even the crows — nature’s most resilient urban survivors — are thinning out. While we debate urban smog, rural air pollution has been killing silently. Pesticides and dust have rewritten the ecosystem and biodiversity landscape.

I still remember the day I first arrived in Pune for my post-graduation, a day drenched by the early monsoon spell. Shivajinagar’s Vidyapith Road unfolded like a postcard — trees on either side forming a dense green archway, moss-laden branches leaning in gently, as if the city itself was welcoming you. It felt like Pune was breathing with you. That same road is now punctuated by glass towers and perpetual construction. Where tree canopies once met, hoardings now compete for attention. As you drive toward the outskirts, the green doesn’t just fade — it is erased. Grey takes over.

On winter mornings, Pune’s AQI now slips into the “poor” to hazardous category, levels once unthinkable for a city marketed as a climate refuge. Between the explosion of vehicle populations and road-digging projects that operate on geological timelines, even the university campus — once a sanctuary of thought — is no longer immune to the concrete creep.

We tell ourselves this is the price of progress. But the body disagrees. The lungs know. The brain knows. Birds knew long before we noticed. This isn’t just nostalgia speaking; it’s biology. And biology, unlike politics, does not negotiate. It keeps score meticulously. What unsettles me most isn’t that Pune has changed — cities must evolve. It is how quickly we normalised the loss. We treat toxic air like bad weather or background noise: Unfortunate, unavoidable, and someone else’s responsibility.

This is not an argument against growth. It is a refusal to accept that choking is the entry fee to modern life. Clean air should not be a childhood memory or a weekend luxury found only in Mahabaleshwar. It should be the baseline promise of a city. When a city cannot provide clean air to breathe, it doesn’t just suffocate lungs; it suffocates thought. Pune once clarified thought. Now it clouds the mind. We should stop asking how bad the air has become and start asking why we were willing to accept this deal in the first place.

The writer is a Gates Cambridge scholar, Helmholtz research fellow, and Lowry Prize winner