By Vanita Bhatnagar
Bhiwadi, Rajasthan: In a low-ceilinged room on the industrial fringe of Bhiwadi, a town in Khairthal-Tijara district Rajasthan, Meena (29) sat cross-legged on a burlap mat, her fingers moving quickly as she drove a heavy needle through stiff leather. She assembles shoes for a few rupees a pair, paid by output, not hours.
“You mean the fog?” she pointed above when this reporter asked about the air pollution, nodding dismissively.
For Meena, the smog is not a problem to be solved. It is part of the scenery, as ordinary as the dust settling on her windowsill.
Her children, aged three and four, attend a nearby anganwadi in the mornings. In the afternoons, they play in dusty lanes shared with trucks and factory workers. “Children grow up by playing outside only,” she said.
When her children fall sick, which now happens often, the cost is doubled. There is the expense of treatment, and then the loss of income when she cannot meet her daily quota. She has no vocabulary for particulate matter or respiratory load. She speaks instead in the arithmetic of survival, where every sick day pushes the household closer to precarity.
This constraint on childhood is not incidental. It is a direct consequence of life in Bhiwadi: an industrial town whose rapid expansion now collides with a warming climate.
Located on the Rajasthan-Haryana border in Khairthal-Tijara district, Bhiwadi has transformed from a quiet agrarian belt of mustard fields into the state’s primary economic engine. It is Rajasthan’s largest contributor to Goods and Services Tax, generating roughly 12% of the state’s total revenue.
The town’s industrial sprawl is anchored by global manufacturers. Saint-Gobain operates one of the world’s largest integrated glass plants here, alongside Asahi India Glass. Their furnaces run around the clock, supplying architectural and automotive glass across India. Bhiwadi is also a critical node in North India’s auto belt. Honda and Hero MotoCorp have large manufacturing bases here, supported by hundreds of ancillary units producing everything from pistons and engines to air-conditioning systems.
This industrial density has come at a staggering environmental cost. Data from IQAir has repeatedly ranked Bhiwadi among the most polluted cities in the world. A study by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, found that more than 400 large industrial furnaces — many burning coal and wood — contribute nearly 30% of the town’s pollution load.
In earlier years, seasonal winds and temperature shifts allowed at least some of this pollution to disperse but that margin has narrowed. What has changed in recent years is not only the volume of pollution, but how long it stays suspended.
Rising temperatures and increasingly stagnant wind patterns are triggering more frequent and persistent temperature inversions, which is “a meteorological phenomenon that traps cooler air — and pollution — close to the ground”
According to the India Meteorological Department, 2024 was India’s warmest year on record. Average minimum temperatures across the country were nearly 0.9°C higher than the long-period average.
“In a warming atmosphere, the vertical temperature profile of air changes,” explained Manoj Kumar, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “These conditions make temperature inversions more frequent and longer-lasting, especially in industrial regions.”
In Bhiwadi, this means children are breathing yesterday’s emissions along with today’s.
Children are particularly vulnerable because they inhale more air per kilogram of body weight than adults, and their organs are still developing. “Their bodies lack the defence mechanisms of an adult,” said Dr Kailash Rajora, a paediatrician at the Government Hospital in Bhiwadi. “Pollution interferes with growth in ways that can have lifelong consequences.”
On the morning of December 15, before the sun had cleared the industrial haze, smartphone screens across Bhiwadi flickered with the habitual, low-grade anxiety of mothers’ WhatsApp groups.
“Are you sending the kids today?”
The message appeared on the phone of a mother in Kahrani village, sent by a friend whose five-year-old had spent the night with a dry, persistent whistle in his chest.
The reply was hesitant, shaped by the data from the day before. On December 14, Bhiwadi recorded an Air Quality Index of 472, classified as “hazardous”. On the 0-500 AQI scale, anything above 100 poses a direct physiological threat to children.
What parents were responding to was not just pollution, but its persistence. In recent winters, the haze has stopped lifting by mid-morning. The air no longer clears with the sun.
By 9 am, the consequences of those exchanges were visible at a government middle school. Uma (35), a mathematics teacher with a decade of service, stood before a classroom that felt unusually sparse. “Out of thirty-five students, only twenty-three are here today,” she said, gesturing towards the empty desks.
At the Government Hospital, Dr Rajora sees the physical manifestation of this absence every morning. He calls it the “dawn peak”.
“Parents tell me their children go to sleep fine,” he said. “But they wake up with choked throats and voices so raspy they seem to have aged decades overnight.”
This is not a condition cured by hot water or simple syrups. For many children, the only way to clear their airways is through a clinical regimen of steroids.
This is not an accident of geography alone. A senior official at the Rajasthan State Pollution Control Board described Bhiwadi as a product of “accidental urbanism”, a town where factories arrived first and people followed later. No buffer zones were planned, leaving residential colonies, schools and anganwadis physically entangled with heavy manufacturing.
The consequences of this planning failure are compounded by regulatory collapse. The local pollution control board operates with nearly a 50% staff shortage while processing one of the highest volumes of industrial permits in the state. As paperwork piles up, field inspections have dropped sharply by nearly 40%, according to officials.
The board’s laboratory in Bhiwadi cannot test for heavy metals or several hazardous pollutants. “Everything goes to Alwar for testing,” said a scientist officer, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The town’s Common Effluent Treatment Plant, which took 17 years to become operational, remains under strain. Midnight discharges from small units routinely bypass treatment to cut costs. When the board issues directives, to pave dust-heavy roads or fix wastewater overflows — implementing agencies such as Rajasthan State Industrial Development & Investment Corporation Ltd or the Nagar Parishad often cite lack of funds.
The result is regulatory stagnation: those who comply incur costs, while violators continue unchecked.
The fallout is most visible in schools.
In better-funded private institutions, the response has been a quiet retreat indoors. Outdoor assemblies and morning physical training have been permanently cancelled. “We only do indoor sports like karate or gym now,” said a physical education teacher.
For smaller schools near the industrial periphery, even this option does not exist. On days when the AQI crosses 350, children are forced to choose between poorly ventilated classrooms and dust-filled courtyards.
On one such day, with AQI at 392, students sat in an open compound to write their exams. “They complain of watery eyes and itchy throats,” said English teacher Ranjita Jain. “But exams cannot wait for the wind to change.”
Bhiwadi’s annual PM2.5 levels have exceeded national safety standards for years. In 2021, the town recorded an annual mean PM2.5 concentration of over 106 µg/m³ which is far above the national limit of 60 µg/m³ and higher than Delhi’s average that year.
Teachers report a shifting baseline. “Five years ago, a child might miss school for a seasonal cold,” a principal said. “Now, six or seven are absent daily with chronic cough or fever.”
“When a child consistently misses foundational lessons because they are tethered to a nebuliser,” Jain said, “the classroom stops being a place of learning. It becomes a cycle of permanent catch-up.”
At the government hospital, the “Bhiwadi cough” is no longer treated as seasonal. It is chronic.
“The number of asthma cases and severe skin allergies has more than doubled in the last five years,” Dr Rajora said. “We are seeing patterns we didn’t see a decade ago.”
Beyond the lungs, the damage is neurological.
Dr Harshal Ramesh Salve, a public health expert at AIIMS Delhi, said ultrafine particles are small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. “We are seeing clear associations with lower attention spans, hyperactivity and an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders,” he said.
Because chronic respiratory illness limits physical activity, children become sedentary, increasing long-term cardiovascular and metabolic risks. “This is a compounded risk profile,” Salve said.
Yet the absence of local, longitudinal studies allows the state to continue prioritising industrial output over paediatric health.
“We teach children about conservation and environmental protection,” Uma said. “But outside the window, we show them the opposite.”
Each morning, despite hazardous air, hundreds of private cars idle outside school gates. Inside homes, middle-class families retreat into sealed rooms with air conditioners running round the clock — private solutions to a public crisis.
Bhiwadi’s 12% contribution to Rajasthan’s GST is built on an urban model that never accounted for human breath.
The town is not an anomaly. It is a warning. Across India, state pollution control boards remain underfunded and overstretched, their mandates expanding while capacity stagnates. The paperwork circus, the data vacuum and the regulatory drift seen in Bhiwadi are now standard practice. For children growing up beneath its smokestacks, climate change has not arrived as a future threat. It is already here and it is settling into their lungs, shaping their classrooms and quietly narrowing their futures.
This project is supported by the Internews Earth Journalism Network with funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)
This article was originally published in 101 Reporters under Creative Common license. Read the original article.
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