2015A son who could not breathe. After the family moved from Hyderabad to Bangalore, the boy started waking at night struggling for air, and doctors had nothing to work with until one of them said it might be what he was breathing. The nearest government station was 15 km away reporting a safe 20 while Anand's own house read 800, so he built a monitor. Every household on the street had a skin or breathing complaint. Air pollution interested nobody that year.
2015-16Forty autorickshaws, eighteen million rows. Every official station on earth logs one row an hour, about 11 million rows a day for the whole world. Sensors strapped to 40 Bengaluru autos returned roughly 18 million in a single day for one city, which is enough to say which side of the road, at what hour, and where you can take a child for a walk. A parent rang three months later to say the study had improved her daughter's asthma. That is when Ambee started.
2017250 monitors for the whole country. Twenty-two of the world's twenty-five most polluted cities are Indian, and a WHO-linked study put the minimum for tier-1 and tier-2 cities alone at around 4,000 stations.
2018-19Air reaches the assemblies and the manifestos. The subject nobody wanted in 2015 turns up in legislative debate and party promises. Delhi is running 15, 16, sometimes 20 times the safe particulate limit of 25.
2019The energy flow, drawn as a Sankey. Coal and oil fired electricity, direct coal, gas and biofuels on one side; industry first, transport second, buildings third on the other. Anand puts actual consumption at roughly a thousand parts fossil to one of solar, which is why an EV charged off a thermal grid relocates the emission rather than removing it. He cites 8% of GDP already lost to air pollution.
2019-21The same plume, three winters running. He replays NASA's fire-tracking satellite on screen: red dots across Punjab and Haryana by 16 October, smoke spread over the Indo-Gangetic plain by November, and by December a grey lid that walkers mistake for fog. In the 2021 frame the visibility of the whole region is gone.
TodayAbout 800 monitors, and a business built on the gap. Ambee gave up on hardware once it saw consumer monitors end up in a drawer like an unused fitness band, and sells street-level data instead. Pharma buys 30 years of location-linked exposure by API call, because India has almost no digitised medical records and drugs trialled in the US behave differently here. Insurers are close to an air-quality-linked health plan. The app stays free and ad-free, a quarter of a million downloads and 100,000 daily active, carrying what he calls India's first pollen alerts. A Bengaluru government grant and a place in Airbus BizLab, while ISRO is reachable only through a tender that needs a lobbyist or a system integrator.
Jan 2024PACE goes into orbit. Feedback on the gaps in NASA's own data won Ambee a place in the hyperspectral programme due to launch then. Until it flies, the work runs on simulated data and other satellites.
2050The athletes who never arrive. Anand's statistic is that a majority of the population in these regions will grow up with underdeveloped lungs, and Vishal states the consequence plainly: no world-class track and field out of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
