At the second edition of Van Heusen + GQ Fashion Nights, menswear designer Rajesh Pratap Singh put up a fine display of menswear – angular cuts, flowing silhouettes, solid colours. While the collection itself was another milestone in Singh’s pursuit of sustainable fashion, he had another point to make through the show: The models walked the ramp with giant gas masks snapped onto their faces, as a montage of grey, sunlight-devoid urbanscapes played on the screen behind them. Singh called it Every Breath You Take.

This was in 2016. Weeks earlier, the entire city of Delhi had been brought to a grinding halt after six days of unrelenting smog. The concentration of particulate matter (PM) had reached critical levels of toxicity. Coal-fired power stations, construction sites, schools were all shut down to bring the situation (worsening due to the north Indian festival season and ritual farm-burning) under control.

A year later, the capital earned the dubious distinction of being the most polluted city on Earth, even ahead of Beijing. And while legislative work – like a ban on firecrackers, the failed odd-even car driving project and now monitoring air quality year-round – has to do its bit, the call to think out of the box is getting louder. Even as air purifiers become ubiquitous inside homes, three social entrepreneurs are angling to make the quality of the air we breathe better. Or, at least, trying their hardest to ensure that we don’t reach that point where gas masks are more than a cautionary device, on or off the ramp.

Anirudh Sharma

Who: A graduate of MIT’s Media Lab, who developed Lechal (2015): A shoe fitted with the vibrator of a mobile phone to give visually impaired people a haptic sense of direction. In 2016, the 30-year-old co-founded Graviky Labs, a start-up that’s developed a way to convert carbon captured from the air into printing ink.

Mission: Inspired by American scientist and futurist R Buckminster Fuller, Sharma looks at the carbon matter produced by fossil-fuel burning as “a source of life”, and also a resource to be harvested.

The technology: Following the art-meets-functionality aesthetic of Turkish architect Mimar Sinan, and an intensive study of work “at the intersection of hard tech, industrial design and art,” Graviky Labs has created Kaalink: a canister-like filter that can be slapped onto car exhaust pipes, diesel generators and other fossil-fuel chimney stacks to capture PM, which is then mixed with liquids and solvents and poured into pens and ink bottles, branded as Air Ink.

Status: Air Ink was a massive success on Kickstarter, and has already been deployed for independent design and street art projects around the world. Sharma says he’ll be “launching it in the consumer market soon.”

The potential: The soot captured, according to Sharma, has wide uses: “It can turn into nanotubes, used in pencils, on fabrics.”

Where it needs to be implemented: “Delhi, of course. The world’s ten most polluted cities are in India. Are we the world’s ghetto?”

End goal: “To cease the project. I’d hope to see a time when we aren’t left with any pollution to be captured.”

Shubhendu Sharma

Who: A 33-year-old engineer and founder of Afforestt, a Bengaluru-based company that helps create native forests in your backyard.

Mission and method: To bring back the natural cover of the planet by planting climax forests and, importantly, trees native to their regions through a seven-step process. “It’ll thrive if people stop trying to make gardens on-trend and ornamental. They’re planting neem trees in Mexico, and Mexican varieties in Indian climate. It’s madness.”

His motivation: During his tenure at a Toyota car factory, Sharma came across the work and philosophy of legendary Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who’d been tasked with making the factory “carbon-free”. Sharma was intrigued by Miyawaki’s theory that the Earth has the potential to bring back its own forest cover, and studied and replicated the method (involving research on climax forests, preparing the soil, planting and maintaining techniques) on his home turf, Uttarakhand.

Scale: Afforestt has worked in 13 countries, planting forests in all kinds of situations, residential complexes, desert lands and even on airport grounds.

The benefits: Sharma’s primary goal was to stem urban migration, but the advantages of having a forest growing wild in your backyard are several – and as basic as a 6th grade science lesson. Apart from conserving groundwater, and offering a sense of mental and physical wellbeing, “trees absorb PM but also produce oxygen. It’s a closed loop system to combat air pollution.”

Angad Daryani

Who: A 19-year-old inventor currently studying at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. His past work includes building a low-cost 3D printer and a “virtual Brailler”: an e-book reader that converts digital text from Roman to tactile Braille.

Mission and technology: To “capture cancerous particulate matter from the air, hopefully without causing emission of other gases.” Daryani’s working on 20ft-tall air-purifying towers for public spaces that would run on electricity, and be “non-intrusive, minimalist, smart, weather-resistant and palatable with India’s tropical climate.”

His motivation: Daryani met Daan Roosegaarde (the Dutch artist and innovator who created the smog-free towers installed in parts of China) at TEDxGateway 2018, where they were both speaking. Upon learning that Roosegaarde had no plans to bring his design to India, he took up the challenge himself.

Status: He’s successfully tested the tech via 7ft-tall prototypes that he created at his university’s lab. Now, with a team of student engineers, mathematicians, physicists and industrial designers, he’s working

on scale, and patents.

Where it needs to be implemented: “Large cities, cramped spaces with industries and vehicles, areas surrounding coal power plants and farms that follow the slash-and-burn model of cultivation.”

The long road: “I’ve always wanted to work on electric cars, but I’ve learned that a complete switch over to electric is at least 30 years away for India. All that while, our population, industries, buying power will continue to grow. An air-purifier tower of this sort could buy us a few years of life.”

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