Silent Suffocation

Today, while travelling on Banepa Sanga Road, I witnessed something I don't think I'll forget. A mother was carrying a baby who couldn't have been more than three months old.

The road was buried in dust because of the ongoing construction.

She covered her baby with her shawl, trying to keep the dust away. But it was a hot summer afternoon. The baby kept pushing the shawl away with those tiny hands, searching for a little fresh air, not knowing that the air outside was full of dust. That moment stayed with me. We often call this development.

We celebrate wider roads and bigger projects.

But if a child's first breaths are filled with dust instead of clean air, we need to ask ourselves what kind of progress we are really making. Every day, thousands of people travel this road.

Mothers, children, students, workers, and the elderly.

For most of us, the dust disappears after a bath.

For our lungs, especially those of children, it does not. A society is not remembered by the roads it builds.

It is remembered by how it protects the people who walk on them. I hope the day comes when no mother has to choose between shielding her child from the heat or shielding them from the air they breathe.