Heed Gita Gopinath’s warning from Davos: Pollution is silently taxing India’s health and growth

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When Harvard Professor Gita Gopinath told a Davos audience that pollution costs India more dearly than tariffs, she wasn’t being provocative. She was making a strictly economic point: pollution is a continuous tax on productivity, public finances and human capital—unlike tariffs, which are episodic and negotiable.

Hence tackling pollution “on a war footing" should be a top national mission. Days earlier, Indore—celebrated as India’s ‘cleanest city’ year after year—was forced into a humiliating reckoning. At least eight people died after allegedly drinking contaminated water in one locality, while hundreds were hospitalized.

The cause may have been a local civic failure: an ageing pipeline network, poor safeguards and ignored warning signs. But the deeper lesson is national. How can rankings of ‘cleanliness’ coexist with deaths from drinking water? The imagery was almost allegorical: residents queuing at tankers and bullhorn announcements warning against piped water while walls nearby still had slogans boasting of Indore’s cleanliness.

If Davos was the global mirror, Indore was the domestic shock. These two remind us that pollution should be one of India’s top developmental priorities, not as a niche ‘environmental’ concern, but as a public health emergency and growth constraint. The most dangerous feature of air and water pollution is that they kill quietly.

Their effects accumulate through everyday exposure, burdening normal life with chronic risks. A recent multi-city study reported that across 10 major Indian cities, about 33,627 deaths per year were attributable to short-term PM2.5 exposure above the World Health Organization’s 24-hour guideline (15gm per cubic metre). The sting is