‘Air too poisonous to study’: Founder’s viral post questions Delhi’s academic routine

Every winter, Delhi’s 30 million residents brace for a familiar yet exhausting crisis — air quality plunging to hazardous levels, daily routines collapsing, and parents scrambling to protect their children from toxic smog. This year has been no different, with AQI readings once again forcing schools to shut and families to make difficult choices.

Amid this, a thought-provoking LinkedIn post by Delhi-based Akshay Verma, Co-founder of FITPASS, has struck a chord with thousands of parents. In his post, Verma writes about how even his 3-year-old son now has to learn an unexpected new concept: AQI.

“One week he’s learning how to hold a pencil… next week he’s learning why he can’t go to school because the air is ‘too poisonous’,” he writes, highlighting the surreal reality of parenting in the capital — where school closures have become as unpredictable as the smog itself.

Verma points out how Delhi’s stop-start academic routine is increasingly dominated by sudden shutdowns. “Summer break, Diwali break — and now an annual ‘pollution break’ nobody wants to call by its real name,” he says. For a child who still thinks “clouds live inside cartoons,” he adds, trying to explain toxic air is both heartbreaking and absurd.

Against this backdrop, Verma proposes a simple but radical rethink:

Why not flip the academic calendar?

Instead of the long summer break, he suggests a long winter break — from Diwali to January — when Delhi’s air quality consistently dips to its worst levels. Since heat can be managed but toxic air cannot, Verma argues that schools could operate smoothly through the summer and pause during the months when pollution routinely shuts the city down anyway.

Doctors, he notes, are already advising families who can afford it to relocate to cleaner cities for 6 to 8 weeks during peak pollution. But for most households — including millions of working-class families — that isn’t an option. “They are forced to breathe whatever the city decides,” Verma writes.

Drawing parallels with hill schools, which have long aligned their calendars with weather patterns, he argues that Delhi has enough data to adopt a similar model. “A city’s future sits inside its classrooms,” he says. “Right now, those classrooms are empty.”

Internet reacts

Reacting to the viral post, a user wrote, “I agree with you, Akshay Verma. Why not use the same approach as hill schools and adjust the school calendar for the climate? It could make a real difference for families.”

“This is such a grounded perspective. Thank you for naming the discomfort instead of normalising it someone needs to say it clearly,” another user wrote.

“This is such an important perspective. Air quality isn’t just a statistic it’s shaping childhoods and routines. Aligning school calendars with reality feels like common sense, yet it’s rarely discussed. Thanks for starting this conversation,” the third wrote.