Environmental catastrophe will be a tragedy authored by everyone

Every June 5, authorities plants saplings and posts photographs, telling a comforting story and pretending that environmental collapse is due to poor “public awareness”. If enough Ministers post enough photographs, the rivers will clear and the air will thin and the water table will rise back.

This World Environment Day, it is worth refusing that comfort and telling the harder, sadder story and holding everyone responsible.

India is the sixth most polluted country, with a national PM2.5 average of 48.9 µg/m³ — nearly 10 times the WHO’s safe limit. Thirteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in India, with Delhi perennially leading as the most polluted capital. These numbers translate directly to mortality. Particulate pollution killed over 1.7 million Indians in 2022 (a 38% increase since 2010), carrying an economic cost of $339.4 billion, or 9.5% of the GDP.

The Air Quality Life Index notes that dirty air shaves 3.5 years off the average Indian life, going up to 8.2 years in Delhi. Yet, this catastrophe is aristocratic in its escape. The affluent retreat behind HEPA filters and reverse-osmosis taps, buying private immunities to public failures. It is the poor who pay the blood price for this economic growth.

This crisis does not stem from state inaction, but administrative failure. The 2019 National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) aimed to cut particulate pollution by 40% by 2025-26. Seven years on, only 23 of the 131 targeted cities achieved this, while 190 of the 229 monitored cities violated safe standards.

Funds frozen

By May 2026, Delhi had utilised just 25% of its ₹81.36 crore allocation, while the capital choked on a nation-worst annual PM10 average of 197 µg/m³. With only 90 out of 130 cities completing source apportionment studies under NCAP, 40 cities still do not know the sources of their pollution.

Worse is the fund utilisation. A staggering 68% of NCAP spending went to the most “photogenic” pollutant: road dust. Critical combustion sectors such as transport (14%), waste management (12%), and industries (less than 1%) were practically ignored. The state sweeps visible dust while leaving the poison we breathe. Basic infrastructure lags, leaving a shortfall of 465 manual monitoring stations, while the state actively dilutes Environmental Impact Assessments to expand coal mines and clear forests.

If air is the crisis we can see, water is the crisis we choose to ignore. Roughly 600 million Indians face extreme water stress. Supporting 18% of the global population on just 4% of its freshwater, our per capita availability is plummeting toward a projected 1,446 cubic metres by 2031, down from 5,000 cubic metres at Independence and well below the international water-stress threshold.

India is the largest extractor of groundwater on earth, drawing 247.22 billion cubic metres annually — roughly a quarter of all groundwater extraction. In Punjab, extraction runs at 156.36% of annual recharge. We are drinking water borrowed from a future arriving with dry wells. Today, 11 of India’s 15 major river basins face severe stress, and recently, 13 major reservoirs dropped below half capacity. Although deeper borewells and tankers delayed NITI Aayog’s 2018 prediction of “zero groundwater” for major cities by 2020, the structural water crisis has severely worsened by 2025-26.

Scorching dry spells

This self-inflicted drought collides with a violently shifting climate. Lethal summer heatwaves push survivability limits, while the monsoon — Indian agriculture’s reliable metronome — has fractured into long, scorching dry spells punctuated by apocalyptic, city-drowning downpours.

We must also turn our gaze to the mirror, because the data does not absolve the governed. India emits nearly 9.3 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, burning 5.8 million tonnes in the open, its per capita plastic-waste generation has nearly tripled since 2016. Every casually tossed polythene, plastic bottle and burning landfill joins the public cloud.

Then, there are the farmers who are deeply destructive not through malice, but through rational response. MSP incentivises flooding of water-hungry crops in semi-arid belts. Paddy in Punjab and Haryana consumes up to 5,000 litres of water per kilogram of rice. It is the policy that actively subsidises the depletion of our aquifers.

Running beneath all of this is a sharp irony. We claim an “ecological civilisation” that sacralises nature — that the river is a mother, the mountain a god, the tree a living kin — while letting the holy rivers such as the Yamuna (which supplies 70% of Delhi’s water) run thick with toxic froth. We revere the river in verse but treat it as a drain in our extractive state.

Yet, to end in despair is an evasion. A tragedy authored by everyone is one that everyone can amend. We need unglamorous fixes: ring-fenced funds with penalties for non-utilisation, pollution targets aimed at combustion rather than dust, and agricultural policies that pay farmers to diversify rather than drain aquifers. A citizenry’s complicity can be shifted, slowly, by the refusal of the single plastic bag or bottle, the single act of deflection.

We are among the best-informed environmental catastrophes in human history. We have the data. We have the money. What we lack is the will to let knowing cost us something. Until we find it, every World Environment Day remains a better-lit, better-photographed way of doing nothing at all.

Deeksha Tyagi, is a researcher and political consultant, currently affiliated with the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research, Pondicherry. Her essays have appeared on a range of academic and public platforms. She is a history graduate from Miranda House, University of Delhi.