Like thousands of others, Megha Mathur moved to the Indian city of Gurgaon for a coveted job in tech. She soon realized she wouldn’t be able to live there very long. The pollution was so bad she had to check an air quality app on her phone several times a day to see whether it was safe to go outside without a mask.
“Having to live like that can cause a lot of anxiety and stress in knowing that’s constantly your life,” Mathur, 27, told CNN Business. “Even though there are exciting opportunities in terms of companies and jobs, it just wasn’t a place that I could see myself living long term and I think a lot of people share that opinion.”
Gurgaon, around 25 miles from India’s capital New Delhi, is one of the country’s newest tech hubs — home to global players such as Google (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) as well as some of India’s biggest startups like food delivery firm Zomato and India’s biggest hotel chain OYO. Mathur, who worked for Zomato, stayed there only nine months before moving with her fiancée Harshvardhan Singh to the southern city of Bangalore.
