I don't have a study to back it up, but it seems the high pollution levels in Indian cities are mostly because of extremely high vehicular density - based on my unscientific observation that most polluted areas of Delhi are next to transportation depots/stations.

Anand Vihar - a suburb of Delhi - for example, is the most polluted place in the world, but that's also because it's the gateway to Delhi for people from the state of UP(200m population). There are like 100 buses coming into that place every few minutes!

But then, there can be solutions which don't negatively affect growth - public transportation, more and better planned cities to reduce vehicular density, and most important of all, elimination of subsidy on diesel - because the sources of pollution aren't fundamentally tied to growth.

I don't usually buy the argument that high growth will bring abnormal levels of emissions in the Indian context. I think that's because manufacturing can be never be the engine of growth in India, because of inherent, almost unfixable problems we have in India.

So, that's why I think that the Indian growth story is fundamentally different from Chinese growth story - or even any other growth story in the world, and it's important to keep that difference in mind.