Every winter, Delhi’s 30 million residents brace themselves for a familiar but debilitating crisis — air quality drops to dangerous levels, daily routines collapse, and parents struggle to protect their children from toxic smog. This year was no different, with AQI readings once again forcing schools to close and families to make difficult decisions.
In the midst of this, a thought-provoking LinkedIn post by Delhi-based Akshay Verma, co-founder of FITPASS, reached 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 she’s learning to hold a pencil… the next week she’s learning why she can’t go to school because the air is ‘too poisonous,'” she writes, highlighting the stark reality of parenting in the capital — where school closures have become as unpredictable as the smog itself.
Verma points out how sudden shutdowns increasingly dominate Delhi’s stop-start academic routine. “Summer break, Diwali break – and now the annual ‘pollution break’ that nobody wants to call by its real name,” he says. For a kid who still thinks “clouds live in cartoons,” he adds, trying to explain toxic air is both heartbreaking and absurd.
In this context, Verma proposes a simple but radical rethinking:
Why not flip the academic calendar?
Instead of a long summer break, he suggests a long winter break — from Diwali to January — when Delhi’s air quality steadily drops to its worst levels. Since heat can be controlled, but toxic air can’t, Verma says schools could run smoothly through the summer and pause in months when pollution normally shuts down the city anyway.
Doctors, he notes, are already advising families who can afford it to move to cleaner cities for 6 to 8 weeks during peak pollution. But for most households — including millions of working-class families — that’s not an option. “They are forced to breathe whatever the city decides,” Verma writes.
Drawing parallels with mountain schools that have long adapted their calendars to the weather, they argue that Delhi has enough data to adopt a similar model. “The future of the city lies in its classrooms,” he says. “The classrooms are empty right now.
The Internet is responding
Responding to the viral post, a user wrote: “I agree with you Akshay Verma. Why not take the same approach as the hill schools and adjust the school calendar according to the climate? It could make a real difference to families.”
“This is such a grounded view. Thanks for naming the discomfort instead of normalizing it, someone needs to make it clear,” wrote another user.
“This is such an important consideration. Air quality is not just a statistic, it shapes childhood and routine. Aligning school calendars with reality is like common sense, yet rarely discussed. Thanks for starting this conversation,” wrote a third.
