The clouds over India are getting darker, literally and metaphorically.

The end-year pollution levels are at frightening levels. In the so-called Millennium City of Gurgaon, a suburb of the national capital, a visitor to the ongoing fintech festival here tells me he is considering moving his family to Bangkok to protect the health of his young children. Even after installing air purifiers in all his rooms, he said, the air quality reading for pollutants, while down from 800, was still an alarming 300.