After living for a brief period of three years in the US with her husband, financial journalist Jyoti Pande Lavakare returned to her hometown in Delhi in 2009. This time, however, she was a mother of two young children and hardly pleased with how the air had changed over the years. "When you are young, you think you are immortal. You don't care about the things waiting for you down the road. But, when you have children, you do begin to worry. Everyone around me was experiencing respiratory problems suddenly. I had asthma as a child, and grew out of it by the age of eight. But, after returning, I experienced my first asthma attack in 30 years," Lavakare shares.

But, the real breaking point came when a friend used the air quality meter inside her central Delhi home, which she thought fell under the safe zone. "The Air Quality Index (AQI) inside my home was 200, way over the WHO limit. When we stepped out, the number went higher. I couldn't believe it."
Lavakare, with a few parents from the neighbourhood, formed a group to start addressing the problem with those around. "My children went to Sanskriti School and I was the PTA president, which made gathering parents easier. We began doing research on air pollution, educated ourselves, and visited school after school to spread awareness."