My mother is sixty-five years old. She lived in Delhi for forty years. She raised me here. She watched two generations of neighbours move in and out of the colony lane. Three summers ago, in May 2023, she stopped going downstairs to the market. By June she had stopped going onto the balcony before sunset. By August she had decided.

She moved to Kerala the following winter. To a small town near Thrissur where the air does not require negotiation, where the temperature in May does not exceed 32 degrees, where she can walk to the temple in the early morning without an air-quality calculation. She is happier there. She is also farther.

The phone calls now have a different texture. Quieter. Fewer. Longer pauses where her old neighbourhood used to live in the sentence.

I should say what is true. My father is not in the picture and has not been for a long time. My mother and I have always had a small family, of two. The colony was the rest of it — the woman across the lane who taught me to read Devanagari, the cigarette-shop uncle who knew my school timings, the gardener who let me name the bougainvillea. Forty years of that texture. Then climate quietly evicted it.

I have a daughter. She has never known a Delhi where May is anything other than closed windows and a purifier that runs all night. She thinks this is normal. She is not wrong about her own experience — this is normal, for her generation. That is the thing I cannot accept.

Why I started this and not something easier

I am an Advocate-on-Record at the Supreme Court of India. I have a law practice. I run several other ventures. I do not need another full-time problem to hold. I started wonarth anyway, because at some point in the last two years I had to admit that I had become one of those people who watches things get worse and writes a thoughtful comment about it on the relevant LinkedIn post.

That is not who my mother raised. It is not who I want my daughter to learn from. So I stopped writing thoughtful comments and started a Section 8 company.

What I am not asking you to do

I am not asking you to feel sorry for my mother. She is, candidly, doing better in Kerala than she ever did in Delhi in the last decade. The story is not a tragedy.

It is a data point. It is one specific 65-year-old who could afford to leave a city when the city stopped being livable. It is a reminder that Delhi already has a generation of refugees from itself, and that the people who could leave have largely left, and that the people who remain are by and large the people who could not afford the option my mother was lucky enough to take.

What we are doing at wonarth is not for my mother. It is for the people in her old colony who could not move. It is for the daughter I have, who has not yet been given the option my mother had.

What I am asking you to do

If you are a Delhi resident reading this with your own mother in mind, I am asking you to be honest about whether you are next. Whether your parents are next. Whether your children are. And if the answer makes you uncomfortable enough, become a Sapling member or a Grove member or a Forest Circle member, and walk a year of plantation drives with us.

If you are a corporate sustainability officer reading this, I am asking you to make one brave board allocation in 2026 toward a venture that does not pretend to be a saviour. Read the Section 135 Compliance Memo.

Some essays end with a flourish. This one ends with a phone call. The next one she makes will have a different texture again. I want it to be a happier one. I am building a venture so that, if I am very lucky, my daughter never has to make that call to me.

— Prashant Kumar Nair, Founder, wonarth · New Delhi