India’s respiratory health burden is shifting toward younger populations, with experts warning that deteriorating lung function among youth poses a long-term demographic and economic challenge.
According to The Economic Times, nearly 81,700 new cases of lung cancer are recorded in India each year, and conditions traditionally associated with older adults, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and tuberculosis are now increasingly evident at younger ages. Rising exposure to polluted air, long commutes through congested traffic, and poor air quality in schools and workplaces are driving this trend. Specialists caution that today’s environmental damage will surface most acutely during the prime working years of India’s population, when economic productivity is most needed.
Insights presented at RESPICON 2025, the eighth National Conference of Respiratory Medicine, Interventional Pulmonology and Sleep Disorders, underscored the severity of the challenge. Experts highlighted that the crisis extends beyond outdoor air pollution, with indoor smoke from biomass fuels contributing to higher lung cancer risk among non-smoking women - a factor often neglected in mainstream policy discussions. Children also remain highly vulnerable, with pneumonia still responsible for 14% of global under-five deaths. Repeated respiratory infections linked to polluted air continue to undermine child health and immunity, reinforcing intergenerational risks.
At the conference, Dr. Vatsala Agarwal, Director General of Health Services (DGHS), Delhi, called for respiratory health to be placed at the centre of national health priorities. “Clean air is not a luxury; it is a fundamental right. Protecting the lungs of our young population is protecting the economic and social fabric of the nation,” she said.
Programme Director of RESPICON 2025, Dr. Rakesh K. Chawla, noted that halving exposure to fine particulate pollution and ensuring guideline-based care for COPD, asthma, and TB could prevent hundreds of thousands of hospitalisations each year, adding productive years back to the workforce. His remarks positioned respiratory health not just as a medical issue, but as a determinant of India’s economic resilience.
Dr. Aditya K. Chawla, Organising Secretary of RESPICON 2025, linked the crisis to broader national concerns, describing respiratory health as “India’s climate story, cancer story, and child-survival story rolled into one.” He warned that visible respiratory decline among young Indians could undermine the country’s demographic dividend if left unaddressed.
The conference, jointly hosted by Jaipur Golden Hospital and the Saroj Group of Hospitals in New Delhi, brought together over 1,200 delegates, including senior pulmonologists, postgraduate students, and international faculty. Proposed interventions discussed included clean-air prescribing in clinics, spirometry-first approaches for chronic cough, universal nucleic acid amplification testing (NAAT) for TB, expanded adult vaccination, and early lung cancer detection using low-dose CT scans and EBUS-guided diagnosis.
For policymakers and healthcare stakeholders, the discussions signalled the urgent need to integrate respiratory health more centrally into India’s public health agenda. As the country prepares for its economic peak, ensuring that its young workforce can breathe freely may prove to be one of the most decisive health investments of the decade.
