Every major sporting event claims to be a celebration of human potential, but if India goes ahead with hosting the 2030 Commonwealth Games in Ahmedabad, athletes may find that the real contest begins before they enter a stadium. The city’s winter air, often saturated with PM₂.₅ concentrations that drift into the “very unhealthy” band, creates a milieu in which even ordinary breathing becomes laborious. Medical research has long warned that such exposure affects oxygen uptake and triggers inflammation within hours. For athletes conditioned to operate at the most unforgiving thresholds of performance, this is not a trivial inconvenience but a structural disadvantage.

These concerns are not speculative. Sports scientists have repeatedly shown how particulate-heavy air depresses VO₂ max and delays recovery. Anyone who followed the 2008 Beijing Olympics will recall the unease among participants marked as staggered arrivals, recalibrated training schedules, public statements about the smog’s impact. China’s short-term measures backed by shutting factories, rationing traffic, drifting into atmospheric engineering were able to soften the pollution curve just enough to get through the event, but even then, the improvement collapsed almost immediately afterwards. The idea that a city’s air can be made pristine for a fortnight and ignored the rest of the year is, at this point, axiomatic only in its implausibility.

Ahmedabad fits uneasily into this pattern. The city, like many urban centres in northern and western India, routinely suspends outdoor activities when pollution surges. School sports are called off, marathons postponed, and advisory notices are issued with grim regularity. If everyday life requires such protective measures, the suggestion that a mega-event involving thousands of international participants can remain insulated from environmental realities begins to look more rhetorical than sagacious. Infrastructure whether modern or ambitious, cannot compensate for an atmosphere that assaults the performance.

The issue, crucially, is not limited to athletic performance. It aligns squarely with human-rights obligations that India has articulated both domestically and internationally. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence under Article 21 has, for decades, treated the right to a clean environment as an essential component of the right to life. International law points in the same direction. Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights obligates States to address environmental determinants of health, and the UN General Assembly’s 2022 resolution on the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment gives this duty a global imprimatur. In effect, inviting athletes into an environment known to be hazardous transforms air pollution from an administrative failing into a possible rights violation.

Recent global judicial developments reinforce this idea. In Urgenda Foundation v. The Netherlands (2019), the Dutch Supreme Court held that inadequate state action on climate risks breached fundamental rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. Although Urgenda does not bind India, it has become emblematic of a broader shift in judicial thinking of elevating environmental degradation, when it foreseeably endangers health, cannot be excused as a mere policy lapse. Similar reasoning now animates decisions in Germany, Colombia, Pakistan, and South Africa. The emerging principle is cogent and increasingly difficult to ignore.

India’s own history adds a cautionary footnote. The 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games are remembered less for athletic triumphs than for corruption allegations, collapsing facilities, and hastily executed construction. Those efforts imposed a heavy environmental toll amid dust-laden sites, uncontrolled traffic surges, and energy-intensive last-minute fixes. Residents felt the impact long after visiting delegations departed. Ahmedabad, preparing for massive stadiums, athlete villages, hotels, and transport corridors, risks reproducing that same pattern. If anything, the environmental burden today is heavier because baseline air quality is already fragile.

Apparently, proponents of the Games often emphasise urban modernisation new roads, upgraded infrastructure and international visibility. Those benefits may be real, but they skirt the central question: can India guarantee, even minimally, that breathing during the event will not harm athletes or spectators? The right to host an international competition is not sacrosanct. It cannot supersede the inherent right to health, particularly when environmental degradation is already recognised as a constitutional concern.

This brings the conversation to its unavoidable conclusion. The issue is not whether India can construct world-class venues; the question is whether those venues will sit under air of a quality that does not endanger the very people invited to use them. If the State cannot offer that assurance, the Games may serve as a global reminder that ambition cannot outrun smog, and that human rights however eloquently articulated must survive contact with the air we breathe.