How Environmental Health Research Has to Navigate Both Science and Politics Environmental health research sits at a strange crossroads. It’s not just a scientific hunt for cause and effect. It’s a practice tangled up in the political economy of the city. For those of us working in Indian urban spaces—where a municipal drain runs past…
The Hubli-Dharwad district health office sits on the second floor of a building that smells of phenyl and old paper. I was there on a Tuesday in March, waiting to speak with the district epidemiologist about a cluster of dengue cases near the railway tracks. Dr. Suresh Hiremath—a man in his late forties with a…
In the cramped lanes of Dharavi, where the air hangs thick with the smell of melting plastic and the constant clatter of small workshops, a community health worker once said to me, “We don’t need a study to tell us the air is bad. We need a study that makes someone do something about it.”…
In the narrow lanes of Dharavi, where the air carries the weight of a thousand small industries, I once met a woman who had been tracking her family’s respiratory symptoms in a diary for three years. She wasn’t a researcher by training, but she knew, with a precision that rivaled any epidemiological study, that her…
In the narrow lanes of Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, the air has a texture. It’s thick with construction dust, the acrid smoke drifting from the nearby dumping ground, and the quiet, stubborn fumes of small industries tucked inside people’s homes. Out here, in Mumbai’s eastern sprawl, environmental health isn’t some distant academic puzzle. It’s about who…
I remember standing on a flyover in East Delhi one October morning, the air thick enough to taste. A government monitor on a nearby rooftop read ‘PM2.5: 480’. But the woman selling tea below the flyover, whose stall sat right at exhaust-pipe level, had no monitor. She had a cough that wouldn’t quit, and a…