Publication Year: 2025

Different Paths to Clean Air: Global Insights for India’s Reform Agenda

Summary

India’s air pollution crisis cannot be solved without addressing key structural and institutional constraints, such as reforming our environmental regulatory regime – one that remains under-capacitated, poorly equipped, and under-funded. Previous works have examined their capacities, constraints, and performance in isolation to understand why frontline environmental regulators in India struggle to meet their mandate. Our new issue brief presents a comparative analysis of learnings from diverse air quality regimes and charts a roadmap for building a capable and forward-looking environmental regulatory regime in India.

We study how countries across the Global South and North, such as Brazil, China, Germany, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, and the USA, have built and reformed their air quality regimes, and what India can learn from them to address the challenges ahead. These countries were chosen to be comparable and relevant to India, and the group is therefore a mix of countries with large economies, a history of dealing with high air pollution, and rapid industrialisation coupled with high GDP growth. The varied source profiles, regulatory institutions, history of air pollution policymaking, and differing governance regimes (unitary vs. federal) in these countries also present differing approaches that could inform Indian policymaking on air quality.

Table 1: Sampling parameters for the 7 countries

We highlight trends and examples relevant to India – how countries set health-based standards, strengthen accountability for action, scale air quality monitoring, and manage airsheds.

Key Learnings

1. Science plays a fundamental role in establishing strict, health-based air quality standards
2. Strong focus on PM2.5 reductions through top-down or bottom-up approaches, depending on country contexts
3. Large increases in monitoring capacity alone may not necessarily yield spatial and temporal representativeness
4. Indian regulators are comparatively resource-poor
5. Airshed-level governance is gaining importance and requires nested governance
6. Accountability is a catalyst for sustained improvements in air quality

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Air Pollution: Public Health Impacts and Policy Measures

Introduction

Air pollution and its impact on human health represent a slow and ongoing public health emergency. The detrimental effects of air pollution span from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases to adverse pregnancy outcomes and developmental problems in children and contribute to premature mortality across the developed and developing world. Air pollution, including microscopic PM and gaseous pollutants, can harm lung function and affect the cardiovascular system by causing oxidative stress, inflammation, altered heart rhythms, and disruptions in blood pressure. PM2.5 (PM smaller than 2.5 microns) can also penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, affecting multiple organs and systems (Izzotti et al. 2022). The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classed PM2.5 as a cause of lung cancers, building on evidence showcasing the carcinogenic effects of both vehicular diesel pollution and coal-burning emissions (Balakrishnan et al. 2015).

The 2019 India sub-national burden of disease study estimated that exposure to ambient and household air pollution contributed to 1.67 million deaths and 53.5 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost, amounting to 17.8% of total deaths and 11.5% of total DALYs, respectively. The economic loss associated with this exposure was estimated at $36.8 billion or 1.36% of GDP (A. Pandey et al. 2020). More recent results using similar approaches indicate an increase in air pollution’s burden of death to over 2.1 million deaths annually in India (State of Global Air 2024). Death rates from various sources of air pollution have changed substantially since 1990, with death rates from ambient PM2.5 increasing by 115.3% and that from household air pollution (primarily from traditional biomass-burning cookstoves) declining by 64.2%.

While the declines in household air pollution impacts are heartening, the increases in death rates from ambient air pollution are only likely to increase in the coming years, with India rapidly urbanising and industrialising. Many of the world’s most polluted cities in the world are in India, several of them tier-2 and 3 cities (IQ Air 2023). Combined with the growing evidence base on air pollution’s health impacts and the need to capitalise on its demographic dividend, there is a greater urgency than ever to tackle the all-pervasive challenge of air pollution.
 

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What Does Net-Zero Mean? Defining Goals Aligned With National Contexts

Introduction

Net-zero emissions targets have emerged as a central pillar of global climate ambition. As of June 2025 (following the US’s second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement), 142 countries have announced—or are considering—net-zero targets. Together, they account for nearly 76% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 84% of the world’s population. However, these targets vary in scopes and timelines, reflecting differences in historical responsibility, development needs, domestic capabilities, political realities, and economic structures. Developed economies like the European Union and Japan target reaching net-zero by 2050, while China aims to reach it by 2060. India has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2070. 

As India gradually pivots towards a net-zero pathway, it is crucial to establish a clear, shared understanding among national and sub-national governments, policymakers, regulators, industries, and civil society of what ‘net-zero’ truly means in the domestic context. Without this coherence, strategies risk being fragmented or misaligned across levels of governance and sectors of the economy. 

This issue brief outlines key considerations that can help shape a comprehensive definition of net-zero emissions for India, not by prescribing implementation strategies, but by deconstructing net-zero targets by their constituent elements necessary for clarity, comparability, and accountability. The brief discusses these elements across four aspects: [1] Targets reflect “what” the entity aims to achieve and whether interim milestones are included. [2] Scope defines “what all is covered”. To put into perspective, two entities may share the same headline target but differ significantly in coverage. [3] Sinks and Offsets clarify how residual emissions will be addressed, and what forms of carbon removals are deemed acceptable, credible, and verifiable. [4] Governance encompasses institutional arrangements for reporting, monitoring, and review. Ensuring that those responsible for delivering on targets are held to account through appropriate mechanisms, incentives, and oversight structures.

Taken together, these dimensions form the building blocks of a robust net-zero definition. The brief’s objective is to support India in deciding the design of the end-goal itself, rather than outlining the path to reach it.

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What Shapes Green Industrial Policy Objectives and Design? A Comparative Policy Analysis of Renewable Energy Auctions in India and South Africa

Abstract

The article compares the renewable energy auctions of India and South Africa, two countries with different institutional approaches to governing markets and different political-economic constraints, to understand how these factors shaped similar policy objectives to be prioritised differently through their auction design. It finds that India’s market-based governance approach and its electricity sector politics resulted in the prioritisation of electricity price objectives while South Africa’s developmental state approach prioritised industry localisation and employment creation objectives through policy design. The survival of India’s politics-centered approach over South Africa’s problem-centered policy design has implications for countries implementing multiple-objective policies.

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