New Delhi: High fossil fuels usage is to blame for nearly 40 per cent of the 16 lakh deaths attributable to air pollution in India in 2021. The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change points to this and other factors to underline the seriousness of the spike in air pollution levels that pushes the AQI into hazardous category this time each year.
Taking stock of how health and climate change interact, the annual report also stresses that India accounted for nearly 16 per cent of consumption-based PM2.5 emissions globally in 2022; the figure was nearly 17 per cent in the case of production-based PM2.5 emissions.
India, the report adds, was “the world’s second-highest emitter of PM2.5 based on both consumption- and production-based accounting”.
Similarly, according to one report that took into account 30,000 monitoring stations in 134 countries and regions, PM2.5 levels in India surged by nearly 11 times higher than the WHO standard in 2023.
Against this backdrop, India has witnessed the creation of a ‘we must do something’ industrial complex to which one can attribute desperate and unthinking ideas including the ‘odd-even’ formula, smog towers and the most controversial one—a blanket ban on firecrackers in Delhi.
While the effectiveness of these approaches warrants discussion, it is equally important for the central government to set up an empowered committee, set clear targets for it and hold it accountable. Governments can also look at two comprehensive reports drafted by The Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) in 2017 detailing an action plan to bring air pollution levels under control.
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