India’s environment crisis demands accountability, not announcements: Saket Burman

Mr. Saket Burman, Chair, Zero Prize & Vice Chairman, Dabur India Ltd.

In an exclusive interview with “The Environment, Saket Burman expressed concern over India’s worsening environmental challenges, saying that rapid industrialization, unplanned urbanization and rising pollution levels are placing unprecedented pressure on the country’s air, land and natural ecosystems. While acknowledging the progress made through various government initiatives, Burman stressed that the need of the hour is to move beyond announcements and adopt evidence-based, results-oriented solutions that deliver measurable reductions in air and land pollution. He called for greater accountability, better alignment of investments with scientific data, and the scaling up of proven environmental innovations to ensure sustainable development without compromising public health or ecological balance.

Why do several Indian cities continue to experience hazardous air quality despite multiple pollution control initiatives, and what corrective measures are needed?
Answer: “No hype / announcements / pledges / rhetoric , only results.”. India’s Air Quality Crisis Needs Accountability. 142 years ago, my family built Dabur on a simple belief that nature, when respected, heals. Ayurveda has always taught us to live in sync with our environment. Today that environment needs our attention back. The gap I keep coming back to isn’t effort, it’s accountability. An analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that 204 out of 238 Indian cities failed to meet national air quality standards during winter 2025. The good news is that this is a solvable problem, and we already know what works in pockets across the country. What we need now is the discipline to measure what works and scale it and to let outcomes, not announcements, lead the way forward. India has introduced the National Clean Air Programme, promoted cleaner fuels, and expanded EV infrastructure — real steps in the right direction. Interestingly, between FY 2019–24, industrial pollution control received a meagre 0.61 per cent of funds even as the data pointed to vehicular and industrial emissions as big contributors.

This is where the real opportunity lies: to align our spending more closely with the evidence, so that we unlock greater impact from the resources we have already committed. This is why we co-founded the Zero Prize, India’s first national results-based environmental award that directly links financial incentives to independently verified pollution reduction. The corrective measures India needs flow from the same logic: India does not lack innovation. What we urgently need are credible systems that can identify, validate, and scale solutions already demonstrating measurable environmental impact on the ground. Nature, when respected, heals. We cannot keep asking nature to heal us while continuing to poison it. It is time to move beyond the boardrooms and into the field. No hype / announcements / pledges / rhetoric , only results.

How can India balance rapid industrialization and urbanization with the need to reduce air and land pollution?

Answer: I have been asked this question as though it is a dilemma. Must India choose between prosperity and clean air, between building cities and protecting land. I do not subscribe to this framing entirely. In my personal experience, Dabur has grown for 142 years by working with nature, not against it. Our founders understood something that modern industrial policy sometimes forgets – nature does not pose a constraint on growth it underpins it. The moment you degrade the land, the air, and the water that sustain your workforce, your agriculture,
and your communities, you are not building an economy. You are depleting it. There is enough evidence that makes this urgent. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, climate change, and population growth have further diversified and intensified pollution sources across India. But the solution is not to slow down growth. It is to change what we reward. For too long, India has treated environmental compliance as a cost of doing business rather than a condition for doing business. Industries have received deadline extension after deadline extension on emission norms. Urban planners have prioritised infrastructure over green cover. And the innovation ecosystem has been rewarded for promising outcomes, not delivering them. The Zero Prize has been designed to shift the conversation from environmental intent to verified outcomes and the same principle must apply to how India governs its industrial and urban expansion. Three things need to change and none of them require a high level of understanding. Green standards must be built into how we plan and approve industrial growth from the very beginning, not imposed as an afterthought once the damage is visible. Cities must plan for clean air and healthy land with the same seriousness they bring to building roads and housing because right now, the environment is consistently the last item on the agenda, and it shows. Most importantly, we must back Indian entrepreneurs who are already quietly solving this. They exist in tier-two cities, in small labs, in communities nobody visits. They just need someone to find them, believe in them, and give them a platform to scale. India’s greatest problem-solving instinct has always been to make something extraordinary from frugal resources. That same spirit applied to pollution is precisely what this moment demands. Rapid industrialization and clean air are not opposites. But they will never coexist by accident. It can happen only by design,and only if every one of us – government, industry, and citizens agrees to be held accountable not for what we promised, but for what we actually delivered.

What are the environmental and public health consequences of open waste dumping and landfill fires in India, and how can they be prevented?
Answer: India’s Burning Waste Crisis is a public health emergency we are choosing to ignore. “These landfills are gas chambers in the making,” as one public health researcher has put it. That is not hyperbole. It is a clinical description of what we have built. India produces 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste per year, projected to reach 165 million tonnes by 2030. More than 2,400 active dumpsites continue accepting mixed waste, lacking proper engineering, which leads to extensive leakage of leachates, hazardous pollutants, and methane emissions. Of the total waste generated, only 22 to 28 per cent is processed or treated,the remainder ends up in landfills, open dumps, or water bodies. The consequences are devastating across every dimension – air, land, water, and human life. Landfill fires are not accidents. They are the predictable outcome of unscientific waste management. Beyond air, the environmental consequences include soil degradation, groundwater contamination, and increased greenhouse gas emissions from decomposing organic waste. The land beneath these dump sites is effectively dead and the contamination spreads far beyond the boundary fence.
This crisis does not affect everyone equally. It falls most cruelly on those with the least power to resist it – marginalized communities, migrants and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are most likely to bear the adverse impacts of inadequate, unscientific waste management. Health impacts associated with increased PM2.5 exposure from landfill fires are aggravated in urban areas because populations live in such close proximity to the emission source. We must stop treating waste as something to be hidden and start treating it as a resource. Organic waste, which is nearly 50 to 55 per cent of municipal solid waste, represents an opportunity for composting and biogas production but most of it ends up in landfills due to poor segregation at source. The value is sitting in our garbage mountains. We simply need the systems to extract it. Legacy waste must be urgently worked on and remediated. Lastly we must back innovators who have proven solutions and get them to scale. Verified reduction, tracked through independent monitoring not announcements, must be applied to government and municipal corporations waste management strategies. India’s waste crisis is, at its core, an accountability crisis. We know the problem. We know the solutions. What we need is the will to measure what actually works and the courage to hold ourselves to that standard.

How effective are India’s current environmental laws in addressing air and land pollution, and what reforms are necessary?
Answer: A few years ago, Dabur set out to conduct a full Life Cycle Assessment of four of our biggest brands. No regulator mandated it. No law required it. We did it because we understood something very important for business – you cannot manage what you do not measure. And you cannot improve what you do not hold yourself accountable for. That gap between what our environmental laws demand and what they actually deliver is at the heart of India’s pollution crisis. India’s legal architecture on paper is not weak. The Air Act, the Environment Protection Act, the Solid Waste Management Rules these are credible frameworks The problem is the glaring gap between what the law says vs. what actually happens. The absence of enforcement is licensing businesses to pollute. Global Performance Indices rank India low precisely due to ineffective enforcement of regulations and poor public compliance. Another important reason that aids for lack of enforcement is the structural failure. Example Pollution boards primarily set standards and grant or deny consent, but enforcement actions like closures typically require state government or court intervention. This fragmentation where a body that monitors is not the body that acts creates a system of diffused accountability where nobody is truly responsible for outcomes. The result is predictable: PM2.5 levels in many Indian cities remain five to eight times above WHO limits, despite policy interventions. We have the laws. We have the targets. We even have the monitoring infrastructure. What we lack is a mechanism that ties all three together and demands verified results. Some reforms we must prioritize are shifts from input-based to outcome-based regulation. Currently compliance is measured by whether a company has filed the right paperwork, installed the right equipment, and paid the right fees. It should be measured by whether pollution levels have actually fallen. Second, give enforcement bodies real independence and real power. The CPCB and State Pollution Control Boards must carry out periodic inspections, monitor emissions and ambient air quality continuously, and have mechanisms to deal with the issues by directly imposing penalties – prosecution, financial sanctions, or licence suspension without requiring political clearance. Third, make data public and real-time. If every polluter’s emission data were publicly visible in real time, civil society, investors, and communities would become the most effective enforcement mechanism India has ever deployed. India’s environmental laws are effective, but the will to enforce them and the architecture to verify outcomes rather than accept promises is the main problem. The Zero Prize was built on exactly this conviction: that what gets measured gets managed, and what gets rewarded gets done. It is time India’s environmental governance worked the same way

How does improper management of plastic waste contribute to land degradation and air pollution, and what steps can ensure a circular economy?
Answer: Plastic Waste Is Not an End-of-Pipe Problem. It Is a Design Problem. India generates 9.3 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, of which 3.5 million tonnes are mismanaged and leak into the environment each year. The consequences hit on two fronts simultaneously. On land, microplastics have entered soil systems, reducing fertility and lowering crop productivity, while single-use plastics clog drains and cause severe urban flooding every monsoon season. In the air, over 5.8 million tonnes of plastic waste are burned openly each year, releasing dioxins, furans, and other toxic chemicals that cause respiratory disease and increase cancer risk. We are poisoning our soil and our lungs with the same material simultaneously. The root cause is a system built around disposal, not design. An estimated 77 per cent of waste generated in Indian cities is dumped into open landfills without treatment, and even the recycling that happens is largely carried out inefficiently in the informal sector. The plastic does not disappear; it fragments into microplastics that have been found in tap water samples across India and are making their way into agricultural soils through contaminated irrigation water. We have industrialised the production of plastic while leaving its end-of-life entirely to chance. A genuine circular economy requires some important things to happen at once. Producers must take real responsibility for what they put into the market. Segregation at source must be treated as seriously as any other public health norm, with investment in the infrastructure and the informal waste picker networks that make it possible. And innovation must be backed with accountability: a circular economy approach could enable two-thirds of all plastics used in India to be recycled by 2035, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 to 50 per cent,but only if proven solutions are identified, validated, and scaled, not just announced. India must move from bans to accountability enforcing performance-linked consequences and embedding circular economy principles that emphasise reduction, reuse, and long-term responsibility. Plastic is not the villain. Our failure to treat it as a resource rather than a throwaway is.

How does construction and demolition waste affect air quality and land resources in urban areas?
Answer: We Are Building India’s Future on a Foundation of Unmanaged Rubble. Every time you see a construction site in an Indian city – you see them everywhere,you are looking at one of our most understated pollution sources. Construction and demolition activities contribute anywhere from 10 to 30 per cent of total particulate matter emissions in urban areas. Yet when we talk about air pollution, we talk about vehicles, stubble burning, and industry. Construction dust rarely makes the headline. It should.India generates between 150 million and 500 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste annually and independent assessments indicate that India recycles only about one per cent of it, leaving over 99 per cent unmanaged. That rubble does not vanish. Large volumes of debris are dumped in lakes, riverbanks, wetlands, and open areas quietly consuming the urban land we desperately need, contaminating water bodies, and choking cities with fine dust that is invisible until it is inside someone’s lungs. PM2.5 particles from construction sites are so fine they bypass the body’s natural defences entirely and lodge deep in lung tissue, eventually entering the bloodstream. This is not a distant risk. It is happening daily, across every city in India that is building something ,which is all of them. The good news is that this is a problem with a known solution. The new Construction and Demolition Waste Management Rules,came into effect in April 2026. The framework is sound,but as we have learned painfully in other areas of environmental regulation, a rule on paper and a rule in practice are two very different things. Most cities still lack the institutional preparedness to carry out systematic and scientific management of construction and demolition waste. What separates success from another well-intentioned policy that gathers dust is accountability for outcomes. Recycling targets must be tracked against verified data not self-reported estimates. The perception that recycled construction materials are inferior — which suppresses market demand must be countered with demonstrated evidence from certified projects. And cities must invest in the processing infrastructure that makes circularity physically possible. The rubble that India produces today is the raw material for the India we are building tomorrow. The only question is whether we are smart enough to treat it that way.

What are the long-term impacts of industrial waste disposal on soil health, groundwater quality, and ecosystems?
Answer: Noraiakheda is a settlement of 30,000 people in Kanpur, built unknowingly, tragically directly on top of a bed of hexavalent chromium seeping from the toxic sludge of an old chemical plant that once served the city’s leather tanneries. That sludge is not just a source of contamination. It is so saturated with flammable methane that it catches fire during summer months, releasing toxins into the air above the very homes of the families living there. Thirty thousand people. Living on poison. This is not a story from a forgotten era. This is India, right now. I find it genuinely difficult to just sit with the scale of what industrial waste is doing to this country’s soil and water,not as a statistic, but as a lived reality for millions of people who have no say in it. Industries generate around 7.46 million tonnes of hazardous waste annually in India, much of which is improperly treated and disposed of, leading to soil and groundwater contamination. When that waste seeps into the ground, it does not stay put. Heavy metals like lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury from unchecked industrial discharges have led to dangerously high groundwater toxicity in clusters like Kanpur and Vapi, For children, the damage is being written into the bodies of the next generation before they are old enough to understand what has been the effect on them. The ecological consequences are just as irreversible. Untreated industrial effluents alter the chemical composition of rivers and lakes, reducing dissolved oxygen and suffocating aquatic life.Contaminants harm aquatic ecosystems as polluted groundwater discharges into lakes, rivers, and wetlands, while soil degradation due to toxic substances erodes biodiversity and plant life. We talk about preserving India’s natural heritage but what heritage remains when the soil cannot support crops and the water cannot sustain life? What makes this crisis so morally troublesome is that it is not accidental. It is the result of choices — choices to look away, delay or improper enforcement, grant deadline extensions, to treat the communities living near industrial zones as acceptable collateral. damage The science is clear. The harm is documented. What is missing is the decision by the government, by industry, and by each of us who benefits from the products these factories make. I co-founded the Zero Prize because I believe innovation can solve this. But innovation alone is not enough when the problem is one of will. We need verified site remediation. We need industries held to independently monitored discharge standards. And we need to start treating contaminated land as a national emergency not a bureaucratic backlog. The ground beneath our feet sustains everything. Once it is gone, no policy, no prize, and no amount of good intention will bring it back

How can citizen participation and behavioral change contribute to reducing air and land pollution in India?
Answer: When was the last time you segregated waste before handing it to the collector? When did you last think about what happens to the plastic bag you threw out, or the stubble a farmer burned because he could not afford a better option? These questions are as consequential to India’s pollution crisis as any law or government programme. We tend to frame pollution as something that happens to us. Factories emit. Trucks pollute. Governments fail to enforce. And yes, all of that is true. But there is another side we do not talk about enough: what we, as citizens, are doing and not doing. When citizens are genuinely engaged, the results are remarkable. Look at Indore, India’s cleanest city for years running. Its success came from collaboration between NGOs, community associations, and citizen volunteers, alongside awareness campaigns involving local celebrities, schools, and religious institutions, backed by regular inspections and incentives to ensure compliance. Nobody handed Indore its clean streets. Citizens demanded it, participated in it, and held their local government accountable to it. Information campaigns alone are not enough. Providing messages and statistics to citizens has been found minimally effective without supportive infrastructure around them. Telling people to segregate waste without giving them the bins, the collection systems, and the confidence that their effort actually matters, will not lead to behaviour change. That is just wishful thinking. The Zero Prize was conceptualised because solutions are already out there, embedded in communities across India, quietly working. Our aim is to find them, verify that they work, and put them at the centre of national policy. But no prize, no policy, and no innovation will fix this crisis if 1.4 billion people do not decide, personally, and collectively that clean air, clean land, and clean water are worth fighting for. The government must lead. Industry must be held accountable. But ultimately, this is a citizen’s crisis. And it demands a citizen’s response.

What strategies can be adopted to restore degraded land and contaminated sites across the country?
Answer: I am not a soil scientist or an ecologist. But I am someone who has spent a fair amount of time building a business that depends entirely on the health of India’s land. It its forests, its farms, and its raw material base. So when I see that millions of hectares of India’s land area is already degraded, I feel a very practical sense of alarm. This is not an abstract environmental statistic. It is a direct threat to food security, rural livelihoods, and the natural resources that millions of Indians depend on. India has already brought a few million hectares under restoration efforts against its 2030 target and I commend that as meaningful progress. But progress in the area covered is not the same as progress in outcomes achieved. Weak monitoring systems mean we are often measuring how much land we have touched, not how well it has actually recovered. We are at risk of repeating the same mistake we make with pollution control rewarding activity over results. What needs to happen – The private sector must step up. It currently contributes only meagerly to global restoration funding, despite having a unique opportunity to invest through sustainable practices and corporate responsibility initiatives. It is neither good enough nor smart business sense. Healthy land is productive land. Contaminated sites restoration must become a genuine national priority, not another policy that exists on paper, and communities must be placed at the centre of restoration, not the margins. Evidence consistently shows that community participation and native species produce far more durable outcomes than top-down programmes. Our land gives us everything. The least we owe it is accountability for how we restore it.

How can Indian cities improve waste management systems to reduce both land and air pollution?
Answer: Imagine ,every single day, urban India generates roughly 970 lakh tonnes of municipal solid waste annually but only 53 per cent of it is actually processed. The rest is dumped on land, in water, or burned in the open. That is not a waste management problem. That is a public health emergency that we have somehow accepted. We walk past overflowing bins, we smell the smoke from burning garbage, and we have come to accept it as the unavoidable price of city life. I refuse to accept that. The frustrating truth is that we already know what works. Example Indore, a city that was once synonymous with garbage and is now a national benchmark. Or Ambikapur in Chhattisgarh, a small city that built its entire waste management system around hundreds of women from self-help groups, actively involved in collection, segregation, and sorting, turning a civic challenge into an economic opportunity for its most vulnerable residents. These are not high-tech solutions. They are human solutions. They work because someone decided to treat waste management as a serious civic priority, engaged communities genuinely, and stuck with it. The model exists. What is missing is the will to replicate it everywhere.
The single biggest shift our cities need to make is actually very simple: Stop mixing everything together and then wondering why nothing can be processed. A significant portion of emissions comes from open burning of waste that could have been composted, recycled, or converted into energy if it had been segregated at source. We are literally burning value and breathing the negative consequences. Cities need to invest in making segregation easy and unavoidable for residents, build the collection infrastructure that gives segregated waste somewhere to go, and stop treating the waste picker community as invisible. They are the system’s last line of defence, and they are doing it without recognition, without protection, and without fair compensation. What I keep coming back to is this: Indian cities will generate an estimated 435 million tonnes of solid waste by 2050. That number is coming whether we are ready or not. The question is whether we build the systems now to handle it or whether we spend the next three decades burying our cities under the weight of our own consumption and mismanagement. I know which future I want for my children. The work starts today, in every home, in every ward, and in every city that is willing to be held accountable for results.

How can technology and innovation be leveraged to monitor and control pollution more effectively?
Answer: When I am asked about technology and pollution, the obvious expectation is that I will talk about artificial intelligence, satellites, smart city dashboards etc. Of course those things do matter. But the most exciting thing I have seen in recent years is far simpler and far more democratic. Picture this – a school teacher in a semi urban area with a low-cost air quality sensor the size of a paperback book, generating real- time pollution data for her students and neighbourhood that no government station was capturing. That, to me, is the future of pollution monitoring in India. Not because the technology is sophisticated, but because it puts the data in the hands of the people who are actually breathing the air. Here is the problem we rarely talk about openly: Vast stretches of urban and semi- urban India are operating with no data, no early warnings, no accountability. You cannot fix what you cannot see. And right now, large parts of India cannot see its own pollution clearly enough to act on it. The answer is not to wait for the government to install expensive infrastructure everywhere. Dense networks of low-cost sensors have been shown to provide better local assessment than sparse networks of expensive reference-grade stations. We have the technology. We have millions of educated, motivated citizens. We just need to connect the two. But monitoring is only half the battle. The other half is making sure the data actually drives action and that is where we as a nation consistently stumble. The bigger structural problem is that we design systems from the top down, assuming a gram panchayat needs the same plan as Mumbai. It does not. A fishing village in coastal Odisha has a completely different pollution profile from an industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu. Technology works when it is tailored to local realities, when a waste collection app is built around the routes that actually exist in that city, when an air quality alert system speaks the local language and reaches people on the platforms.