Air pollution in India is quite a serious issue with the major sources being fuelwood and biomass burning, fuel adulteration, vehicle emission and traffic congestion. India may be lagging behind China on several economic indicators but when it comes to environmental degradation, the country has definitely outsmarted its giant neighbour.

 Last year the WHO assessed 1,622 cities worldwide for PM2.5 and found India home to 13 of the 20 cities with the most polluted air. More cities in India than in China see extremely high levels of such pollution. Especially to blame are low standards for vehicle emissions and fuel. Nor, for different reasons, are rural people better off. Indoor pollution inhaled from dung-fuelled fires, and paraffin stoves and lights, may kill more than 1m Indians a year. The WHO says the vast majority of Indians breathe unsafe air. The human cost is seen in soaring asthma rates, including among children. PM2.5 contributes to cancer and it kills by triggering heart attacks and strokes. Air pollution is likely to cause vastly more deaths as Indians grow older and more obese. Indoor and outdoor pollution combined is the biggest cause of death, claiming over 1.6m lives a year.

According to an international study, Air pollution in Delhi is killing around 80 people everyday. The alarming figure was released by the Union Environment ministry. One of the biggest reasons cited is the respirable particulate matter that leads to morbidity and premature deaths.

The recent study has mentioned that 45 per cent of Delhi?s premature deaths could be controlled if the city took preventive measures to control its problem of air pollution and meet its national ambient air quality standards. The safe standard for PM2.5 in India is 40 microgram per cubic metre (annual average standard), four times higher than the World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline (10 microgram/cubic metre). If Delhi could meet the standard laid out by the WHO, then 85 per cent of premature deaths could be avoided. The study has also used a global model to estimate the number of deaths that can be avoided in future by controlling this air pollution. Across India, 400,000 premature deaths per year could be avoided if we managed to meet the WHO standards. Almost 1.4 million premature deaths from pollution could have been prevented in India and China alone if these countries had met the WHO standard for annual average.

The rate at which urban air pollution has grown across India is alarming. A vast majority of cities are caught in the toxic web as air quality fails to meet health-based standards. Almost all cities are reeling under severe particulate pollution while newer pollutants like oxides of nitrogen and air toxics have begun to add to the public health challenge. Only a few mega cities where action has started show some improvement in air quality but in most cases the particulate levels are still unacceptably high. But medium and small sized towns and cities are witnessing phenomenal spurt in pollution as severe as or more than any mega city.

Improve air quality monitoring to include more pollutants and more areas in cities to assess the risk of air pollution, make appropriate policies to control it and to create awareness amongst people about hard policy decisions. Ambient air quality standards are constantly evolving to address the emerging health challenges. I hope that the most recent attempt by CPCB to revise the ambient air quality standards will set tighter benchmark for air quality. These standards will set new and tighter targets for air quality improvement in our cities one uniform health based standards for all land-use classes tighter standards for sensitive area introduction of more short terms standards, among others

We need to act fast as the gathering evidence worldwide convinces that India requires a leapfrog agenda to address the public health crisis looming large due to rapidly growing air pollution. India needs strong policy interventions to enable research in the field of air pollution. Health-based criteria should become the basis of air quality regulations. Only this can help break business and political resistance to hard mitigation measures to combat air pollution.
  

There aren?t too many comprehensive and systematic epidemiological studies to examine the magnitude of adverse health impacts due to air pollution in India. But evidences are emerging from sporadic studies in a few cities that bear out the public health challenge and the need to integrate the emerging information on air pollution into the policymaking process. The absence of an explicit national policy interlocking health-based criteria with air quality management is largely to be blamed for this lack of initiative. It is extremely important that the government accepts the precautionary principle and integrates health evidences with policymaking.

Sources-

The Hindu.

Indiaenvironmentportal.org

CSE India reports.