#92 - Tanya Kaur Bedi: Healthy Buildings India 2025 Part 3: The Inhalable Diet
Welcome back to Air Quality Matters as we conclude our special series from Healthy Buildings 2025 in Hyderabad with a fascinating conversation that reframes how we think about the air we breathe.
What if we started thinking about air quality as our 'inhalable diet'?
This compelling question drives our discussion with Tanya Kaur Bedi, assistant professor at the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal, who brings a uniquely personal and practical perspective to indoor environmental quality. The conversation begins with a powerful comparison: while we meticulously track our 1,500-2,000 daily calories, we completely ignore the 10,000-15,000 litres of air we breathe every day. As Tanya points out, we're having an inhalable diet right now as we speak, as we sleep, as we work – yet it remains the least discussed aspect of our health.
Her own journey into this field began with a personal mystery: persistent acne that disappeared only when her roommate changed her perfume, revealing how our daily 'breakfast' of air can profoundly impact our health without us even knowing. From an architectural perspective, Tanya reveals how air quality is beginning to reshape India's real estate landscape. Friends with infants developing pulmonary issues are being told by doctors to leave Delhi – not as a suggestion, but as the primary medical intervention.
This migration pattern, though still emerging, signals a fundamental shift in how Indians value clean air versus economic opportunity.
The Middle-Income Reality Perhaps most revealing is Tanya's research into middle-income Indian homes. These families rely almost entirely on natural ventilation, adjusting their lives to the environment rather than controlling it through mechanical systems. In summer, entire families might sleep in the one air-conditioned room they can afford. This means for most Indians, the quality of outdoor air directly determines their indoor exposure – a sobering reality when Delhi regularly tops global pollution charts. The discussion takes a fascinating turn into the composition of household dust. While outdoor dust contains traffic emissions and construction particles, indoor dust tells a different story – it's full of microplastics from degrading bottles and bags, pet dander, and chemical emissions from furniture.
As Tanya notes, you can know about a person's life from their dust, making it a kind of environmental diary we never read.
Design Solutions and Cultural Practices As both architect and interior designer, Tanya advocates for conscious limitation – the idea that more isn't always better when it comes to materials and finishes. She reveals practical design strategies: rounded furniture corners that prevent dust accumulation, avoiding recessed lighting that becomes a heating element for trapped particles, and the radical simplicity of using local, known materials like mud and bamboo over complex chemical products. The conversation also celebrates existing Indian practices that support air quality – the daily dusting, mopping and sweeping rituals that might seem obsessive but actually serve a vital health function. Yet it also confronts uncomfortable truths: the lower your income, the fewer choices you have about materials and location, creating an inequitable distribution of air quality risks.
The Path Forward Tanya's current research into the seasonal aspects of our inhalable diet – how festivals, weather patterns, and cultural practices create different exposure profiles throughout the year – offers a uniquely Indian perspective on air quality science. Her focus on residential spaces addresses a critical research gap, as homes remain the least studied yet most important environments for long-term health. The conversation concludes with a call for awareness and agency. While we might not control our environment completely, we can trust our senses more, ask questions about the products we bring into our homes, and make small behavioural changes that accumulate into healthier spaces. As India's 1.4 billion people become more aware of their inhalable diet, the potential for market transformation is enormous. This episode offers a fresh lens for understanding air quality – not as an abstract environmental issue, but as a daily consumption choice as fundamental as the food we eat. It's a perspective that makes the invisible visible and the complex actionable, perfect for anyone seeking to understand how architecture, culture, and health intersect in one of the world's most challenging air quality environments.
Tanya - LinkedIn
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