Smog refugees: Skilled professionals are trading Delhi for clean air

Adi didn’t leave Delhi with a grand plan or a dramatic declaration. He slipped out the way younger people often do when they feel suffocated, but your mom still wants you home. “I said I’m going for a few days,” he tells me. “And… I just didn’t come back.” No drama, no manifesto. A few days became a few weeks, then a rhythm. Home visits grew shorter, the stays outside grew longer, and eventually everyone understood he wasn’t returning to Delhi life even if they didn't fully accept it.

“Delhi used to suffocate me,” he recalls. “I’m not someone who sits in a room. I want to be out. But Delhi made going out worse than staying in.” Aditya or Adi, as he wants me to call him, is a full stack developer who now writes code from the mountains because he’d rather lose career growth than lung capacity.

And Adi isn’t an outlier. He’s just a symptom of a larger shift we refuse to acknowledge. Delhi has turned into the kind of joke that stops being funny the moment you try to breathe. We pay obscene amounts to live inside a gas chamber and then act surprised when our lungs file for resignation. The city hasn’t failed by accident, it’s been engineered into this mess by governments whose pollution policy can only be described as stupid — spectacularly, expensively stupid.

And while the state keeps pretending the air will fix itself, the people who can leave already have a foot out the door. Some have gone for good. Others vanish for months each winter like migrating birds with corporate jobs. Call it escape, call it self-preservation. Choose your preferred name, but it has already begun.

The first movers

If Adi is the relatable face of this changing reality, Mayur Sharma is the early sentinel. Long before moving out of Delhi became a conversation, he and his family quietly did it. “We were working so hard on awareness…nothing changed,” he recalls.

Mayur is known to most Indians as one half of Highway On My Plate — the food-travel show that educated a generation of viewers about the joys of street food in India. He built his career on stories of taste and places. Ironically, it was Delhi’s air that left his own young children struggling to breathe.

Their son had early lung issues and hence nebulizers became a part of life. But the turning point wasn’t a dramatic health event but something painfully ordinary, a birthday party in South Delhi in winter of 2016. Children were running around and everyone wore masks, pizzas were cooked indoors because the air outside was too toxic. Driving home through a thick and bitter haze, his wife Michelle said the words that cracked open their lives: “I’m buying tickets. We’re moving.”

Within 24 hours, she and the kids had flown to Goa. No school admissions, no plan, no long-term certainty. Just the instinctive, parental calculation that health is non-negotiable. Mayur stayed back two days for a work commitment and then followed. “We never looked back,” he says. The children grew healthier. Their lives slowed down, softened and took the shape of the place rather than the grind of Delhi’s routines.

Mayur is blunt about his privilege. He had a job that allowed travel; the financial cushion to relocate; a partner who agreed instantly; a community flexible enough to absorb a family that arrived mid-semester with more hope than logistics. “We were lucky,” he says. But the choice wasn’t a luxury, it was a compulsion. “If you want a 30-year-old PhD with diseased lungs, stay. Otherwise you choose health.”

The environmental movement around Delhi often frames the air crisis as an abstract policy failure. Mayur frames it in the language every parent understands: survival.

He’s seen the emotional change firsthand. “People don’t realize how waking up to a dirty grey sky affects your mind. Stress, aggression, hopelessness. It’s everywhere,” he says. Unlike policy debates, mental health doesn’t allow for ideological denial.

He admits that Goa’s air is also declining, so every few years they move farther out. But the contrast is still staggering. “In Delhi, if you live in Delhi and work in Gurgaon, three hours of your day just evaporate. Then who has the energy for anything?” In Goa, time expanded again. Their children rediscovered nature, community, and the unhurried curiosity that pollution eats alive in big cities.

Mayur is careful not to preach. “Not everybody can do this. It’s not easy or fair to say ‘just leave’. But if you can - even one family does after this article - that’s one more family whose kids will breathe better.”

A veteran of the fight

While Mayur represents the first phase of escape, the parental instinct to protect your child from harm - Jai Dhar Gupta represents something more sobering, a man who spent a decade fighting Delhi’s air crisis, only to conclude the city isn’t willing to save itself.

He holds a degree in environmental science from the University of Pennsylvania. He understood Delhi’s air long before Delhi wanted to understand itself, and fought Delhi’s pollution longer than most of us have even understood it. He created the hashtag #Airmergency, in 2014 before the country had language for what was coming. He sat on the Delhi government’s first air-pollution task force in 2015. He pushed for masks before masks were a thing. He dragged data, science and common sense into rooms where people insisted dust - not PM2.5 - was the problem.

And yet, he is leaving.

“Since 2014, everything is smog-wash,” he says, a phrase he coined to describe the political hogwash around Delhi’s air. “Nobody is interested in science-based solutions. Unless it becomes a vote-bank issue, nothing will change.”

Jai’s asthma worsened as the city became increasingly unlivable. For the past five years he has been a seasonal refugee. “From late October to early December, I’m out for at least three weeks. Otherwise I’ll be on steroids.” Then he does it again from late December to January. Two migrations every winter, every year. The city he helped fight for is now the city he must flee.

During the pandemic, the final clarity came to him. “This won’t be solved in my lifetime,” he says. So he bought land in the buffer zone of the Rajaji Tiger Reserve and began building a home, and a forest. He started restoring native flora with ecologist Vijay Dhasmana, creating The Rajaji Raghati Biosphere, India's first private biosphere, which he says is now also a training site for Indian Forest Service officers. He calls it a “carbon sink,” but it’s also an exit wound stitched into a sanctuary.

The contrast is brutal. In Delhi, he fought to breathe. In Rajaji, leopards walk up to him like oversized house cats, rubbing their backs against his legs. Oxygen is not a medical metric but a sensation of being alive.

“I don’t know why I’m even waiting for the house to finish,” he says. “I prefer sleeping outside anyway.”

He too acknowledges his privilege — the financial capacity to leave, the education to understand what the air was doing to him, the ability to redirect his life’s work into ecological restoration. “Most people don’t have that. That’s the tragedy,” he says. “This is a problem of illiteracy, poverty, and government paralysis. Most people cannot escape.”

Jai’s departure is not an indictment of Delhi. In many ways it’s worse: it's the logical outcome of Delhi.

What research says about the cracks in our city

The stories sound personal, but they’re not. They fit a pattern global research has already mapped — one Delhi refuses to acknowledge.

A research summary from Yale University’s Economic Growth Center synthesises a study by economist Mushfiq Mobarak, Gaurav Khanna and coauthors who studied pollution-driven migration and productivity in Chinese cities. Their findings, even in summary form, are unsettlingly relevant.

When pollution spikes, skilled workers are the first to migrate. They have more options, more mobility, and higher sensitivity to environmental quality. Unskilled workers stay because they must.

A 10 percent increase in PM2.5 pushed migration rates up significantly, especially among skilled & high-education workers, who were nearly twice as likely to move as unskilled workers.

This creates a split, productivity falls because the very people who drive growth are the ones leaving. Cities lose the workers who contribute disproportionately to its overall productivity. The researchers also note that firms adapt by offering higher wages to compensate for pollution, but only up to a point. Eventually, the economic cost outweighs the premium.

Delhi already mirrors the early stages of this pattern. The first movers are professionals like Mayur and Jai. The ones cities rely on for economic dynamism — the innovators, the specialists, the educated. And the productivity loss from migration is as large as the direct health cost.

You don’t just get sicker cities. You get poorer cities.

The research also points out that pollution control is profitable. Mobarak’s team estimates that cleaner air could raise a city's GDP by about 6.7 percent and incomes by over 12 percent. Pollution control adds to economic growth, not theoretically but practically.

Another study, summarised in the abstract of Pollution-Induced Migration and Environmental Policy in an Economic Geography Model (ScienceDirect), adds more shape to this picture.

Its abstract outlines an economic-geography model showing how pollution-induced migration interacts with environmental policy. When cities fail to mitigate pollution, workers relocate. When enough workers relocate, the city’s economic gravity weakens, which in turn makes recovery harder and costlier.

Essentially, migration amplifies the initial policy failure.

It’s predictable economic behaviour. The research tells us this is not random. It is not anecdotal. This is pollution-induced internal migration, the earliest phase of a slow population shift.

The government’s refusal to treat air as a matter of survival and utmost urgency is not just a public health failure.

It is an economic failure akin to burying your head in the sand, and believing that ignoring the problem would somehow take it away.

The cost of a city slowly poisoning itself

Every winter, Delhi performs the same theatre. Grey skies descend like a punishment. AQI numbers spike into colours no civilised society should recognise as normal. Politicians blame farmers, farmers blame cities, cities blame vehicles, vehicles blame festivals, and everyone blames “the weather.”

The science stays the same; the denial keeps mutating. Meanwhile the air sits inside our lungs, our mood, in our routines. It dictates whether you step outside, whether you open a window, whether your child coughs through the night or whether your morning jog becomes a doctor’s visit. Delhiites are learning to live in retreat - indoors, purifiers on full blast, eyes stinging.

But not everyone can retreat, and not everyone stays.

And if Jai and Mayur were the first movers, the next wave is of young people. Those who don’t really have the privilege, or have the financial runway, but they’ve reached the limits of their lungs.

Take Ishaan Majumdar, 23, who didn't leave Delhi in one fell swoop. He slipped out in intervals, one week here then a few weeks in mountains—each trip a small act of self-preservation. He works in Dun & Bradstreet and his expertise is ESG (Environmental, social, and governance) with a background in climate science, so the irony isn’t lost on him.

He spends his days assessing environmental risks for corporations and his nights breathing the very thing he warns others about. His breaking point was embarrassingly ordinary: an outdoor corporate anniversary event near the Taj. No fires, no kitchen smoke, nothing dramatic. Just air thick enough to make people cough in unison. He left that evening realising he wasn’t exaggerating the problem, he just got used to ignoring it.

Now he carries a mask everywhere. And when the air begins its annual descent into poison, he packs a small bag and leaves. Hostels, basic meals, the same food every day. His costs have nearly doubled. The rent in Gurgaon plus whatever he pays in the hills - but he prefers monotony over breathlessness. There are trade offs too - inconsistent internet, monotonous food, a social life suspended like laundry in mountain fog.

But ask him why he still leaves, and he doesn’t hesitate: “Waking up and opening a window should not feel like self-harm.” And that was that.

Adi – the young developer who chose air over ambition

Adi, the young full-stack developer who made a trade-off he fully understands, is not someone who thrives indoors.

He needs to wander, to sit outside, to exist in the open. Delhi punished that instinct. After a point, he began feeling like he was “wasting his life” in a place that didn’t match who he was.

Life outside Delhi wasn’t a fantasy. He had to rebuild his routines from scratch. Mountain towns shut by 9 pm; the cold decides your movement, your daily habits need rewriting. Work was the larger battle for him. He had to change employers just to be able to work remotely. “I would have earned more if I lived in Delhi,” he admits, but he chose clean air over a steeper career ladder.

He doesn’t pretend everything is perfect. What he misses most is almost endearing: good North Indian food. The mountains have cleaner meals, but not the variety or the comfort flavours. “Pizza mil jayega, best grilled cheese mil jayega… but the food I love? Vo nahin milta” he laughed.

Adi represents a quieter, more revealing pattern - the young, mobile workers who don’t make noise or write angry posts. They just leave. They choose air that doesn’t hurt, routines that don’t suffocate, and a life where the basics - food, water, breath - don’t feel like a daily fight.

When cities lose young talented people like Ishaan and Adi; they lose the future versions of what they could’ve been inside them.

Delhi at a crossroads

Cities don’t collapse in a day. They fray quietly. They hollow out from within. They lose the people who make them dynamic, long before they lose the people who make them crowded.

Delhi is still romantic, still powerful, but it's also failing at an alarming pace. Every winter, more people consider leaving. Every year, a few more actually do. And the tax bracket of this realisation is expanding each passing year.

The tragedy is not that people are leaving. The tragedy is that the city and our governments pretend they aren’t. Pretend that a few sprinklers and an odd-even cycle will reset the sky. Pretend that research doesn’t exist. Pretend that chemicals or particles can be reasoned with,

And above all, they pretend that voters wouldn’t care.

This is a city that takes pride in resilience. But resilience is just the polite word for endurance. Endurance is a resource — it runs out. When research shows that polluted cities lose productivity, lose talent, lose growth, and the government still treats clean air as a seasonal annoyance — that is a failure.

Not of the weather. But of governance.

While everyone wakes up to North India’s pollution woes only in winter, we’ve been tracking it through the year as part of our #FightToBreathe campaign. You can help. Click here.