As 2025 turns the page, the world marks a milestone that many feared might be eclipsed by geopolitical friction: the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China. Since 1950, ties between these two ancient civilizations have been shaped by soaring ambitions as well as strategic competition.

Yet, as we move deeper into the second quarter of the 21st century, both countries are increasingly recognising the necessity of cooperation. President Xi Jinping once described the ideal relationship as a “Dragon–Elephant tango,” while Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stated that India and China are partners, not rivals, and that consensus between them far outweighs disagreements.

The greatest threat to the stability and prosperity of these two Asian giants does not lie in troop movements along high-altitude borders. From the Indo-Gangetic Plain to the North China Plain, a common enemy has emerged: the silent and lethal scourge of air pollution, compounded by the existential challenge of climate change.

Two Nations, One Crisis

Today, New Delhi faces an elephantine challenge. Beijing confronted a similar “dragon-sized” crisis more than a decade ago. Once synonymous with the so-called “airpocalypse,” Beijing’s transformation into a city with increasingly blue skies demonstrates that cleaning the air is not a tax on development, but an investment in sustainable growth.

As India and China commemorate 75 years of diplomatic ties, there could be no more meaningful way to honour the Panchsheel principles of peaceful coexistence than by forging a “Blue Sky Accord”—a partnership based on shared experience to address Delhi’s air pollution crisis.

This crisis is no longer confined to the capital alone. Air pollution in Delhi reflects a broader emergency across northern India. It is no longer merely an environmental issue; it has become deeply intertwined with public health, economic productivity, and development choices.

During the winter of 2024–25, PM2.5 levels across Delhi’s National Capital Region (NCR) reached concentrations far beyond safe limits, imposing what health experts describe as a “permanent health tax” on India’s pursuit of modernity.

Each winter, Delhi becomes a city of closed schools, disrupted flights, overflowing hospitals, and millions breathing air no human body was designed to endure. PM2.5 levels routinely soar to 10–15 times above World Health Organization guidelines. The long-term effects on human cognition and genetics remain largely unknown.

The consequences are severe. Beyond the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 premature deaths annually in highly polluted urban centres, there is a gradual erosion of India’s most valuable asset—its human capital, or Yuva Shakti, as described by Prime Minister Modi. Children grow up with reduced lung capacity, while the elderly face increased cardiovascular mortality. Economically, lost school days, medical expenses, and flight cancellations cost billions of dollars, threatening the vision of Viksit Bharat.

This is no longer an environmental concern alone. It is a public health emergency, a developmental crisis, and a moral failure.

Lessons From Beijing

Moments of crisis can also become moments of transformation. Beijing’s experience offers a powerful example.

When I joined the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1992, China was only beginning to confront its environmental challenges. In 1998, Beijing’s coal-dominated energy system and rapidly expanding vehicle fleet created a combined coal-and-transport pollution crisis. By 2013, average PM2.5 concentrations had reached an alarming 89.5 μg/m³.

By late 2025, however, Beijing’s skies had undergone a dramatic transformation. PM2.5 levels had fallen to around 24.9 μg/m³—a reduction of nearly 75 percent in just over a decade. This was not the result of geography or slowed economic growth, but of one of the most comprehensive urban air-quality programmes ever implemented.

As documented in the UNEP report A Review of 20 Years’ Air Pollution Control in Beijing (2019), this success rested on three critical pillars that India can adapt.

First was scientific leadership and data-driven governance. China empowered leading academic institutions—most notably Tsinghua University—to conduct detailed source-apportionment studies. These identified the “Big Five” contributors to pollution: vehicles, coal combustion, industrial activity, fugitive dust, and agricultural waste.

Such collaboration between India’s IITs, IISc, CSIR institutions, and their Chinese counterparts could help India bypass years of costly trial and error.

Second was targeted intervention. By quantifying pollution sources—coal accounting for 22 percent and vehicles for 31 percent in 2013—Beijing applied policy measures with surgical precision. Its integrated “Vehicle–Fuel–Road” framework tightened emission standards, upgraded fuel quality, and massively expanded public transport and electric mobility. By 2023, Beijing’s entire public bus fleet was electric.

Third was regional coordination. Recognising that air pollution respects no administrative boundaries, China established a coordinated prevention and control mechanism across the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region. This model is directly relevant to India’s Indo-Gangetic Plain, where pollution from Punjab and Haryana inevitably affects Delhi.

Clean Air Pays Dividends

Critics often frame environmental regulation as a trade-off between clean air and economic growth. Beijing’s experience disproves this narrative.

China invested over 800 billion yuan in air-quality improvement over the past decade. Far from being a cost, this generated returns of 3.5 yuan for every yuan invested. Benefits included millions of new green jobs, a multi-trillion-yuan boost to GDP through environmental industries, and sharply reduced healthcare costs.

For India, aspiring to become a $5–10 trillion economy, air pollution functions as an invisible “efficiency tax.” Cooperation with China on green energy, electric mobility, and pollution-control technologies could accelerate growth while safeguarding public health.

Template For Mega Cites

The 75th anniversary of India–China relations offers a rare diplomatic opening. In a world of strategic rivalry, climate change and air pollution represent a shared threat where national interests converge. Environmental cooperation provides a low-politics entry point for rebuilding trust—through joint work on crop-residue management, high-density air-monitoring networks, and clean-energy transitions. Moreover, the Himalayan region—the planet’s “Third Pole”—is acutely vulnerable to black carbon and atmospheric pollutants from both sides of the border. Cooperation on air quality is therefore an act of Himalayan stewardship, protecting the water security of over a billion people.

As leading voices of the Global South, India and China can also pioneer a new model of South–South cooperation. If these two nations can jointly address the world’s most complex air-pollution challenge, they can offer a template for megacities from Lagos to Jakarta.

21st Century Panchsheel 

To commemorate 75 years of diplomatic relations, India and China should articulate a new, environment-focused Panchsheel for the 21st century:

1. India–China Clean Air University Centres, linking Tsinghua University with IITs, IISc, and other leading institutions.

2. Technology-sharing agreements to accelerate India’s transition to clean energy and electric public transport.

3. A Himalayan Air Quality Monitoring Network to protect the Third Pole.

4. A Green Agenda for BRICS, led jointly by India and China.

5. A sustained bilateral climate dialogue anchored in science and public health.

The Dragon–Elephant tango has long been seen as a dance of competition. In 2025, it is time for a new choreography—one that looks upward, toward shared skies. The 21st century belongs to Asia. Its people deserve clean air to live through it.

(The author is former Director, UNEP OzonAction, Coordinating Lead Author, Nobel Peace Prize–winning IPCC (2007), Founder, Green TERRE Foundation. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at shende.rajendra@gmail.com)