The Air They Deserve

While returning home through Jagati, I watched workers laying down a road that many of us will use every day.

Some of them had masks on, doing what little they could to protect themselves.

I stood there for a moment, just watching, and a question kept circling in my head: what can we actually give the people who build our paths? We may not be able to stop construction.

That world, the dust, the machines, the deadlines, isn't something we get to control.

But outside of that, in the part of their lives that belongs to them and not to the project, we can ask for something better.

We can ask for clean air to breathe once they step away from the site.

We can ask for a right to development that doesn't come at the cost of a right to a sound environment. Behind the dust, smoke, and noise is a worker spending hours breathing air none of us would willingly choose.

A mask helps, but it isn't enough, and it was never meant to replace clean surroundings in the first place.

I kept thinking about how normal this has become to us, how we walk or drive past roads under construction in Jagati and elsewhere without really seeing the people inside that haze. Development should move forward.

I'm not against the road, and I know Jagati needs it.

But progress and health were never supposed to be opposites.

Somewhere along the way we decided one has to be sacrificed for the other, and I don't think that's fair, not to the workers, and not to the rest of us who'll eventually use what they're building. The right to a clean and healthy environment shouldn't stop at the edge of a construction site.

It should follow the worker home too.