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New Delhi: Indoor Air Pollution There is a big one health risk instead Outdoors Air Pollution IndiaCities are sometimes cleaner than nearby villages, where domestic pollution is higher, according to two of the country’s top policy experts. clean Air Speaking at the ICAS 2024 Summit, Soumya Swaminathan, Principal Advisor, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, said, “Studies conducted in Delhi have shown that women are more likely to suffer from higher than average exposure to high levels of smoking. Black coal (Women who are mostly at home) are as exposed to air pollution as auto-rickshaw commuters in Delhi, resulting in higher systolic blood pressure. “Cities contribute less than 20 per cent of overall state emissions, wherever they have been assessed, but domestic emissions are dominant, ranging between 20 per cent and 40 per cent. Across the country, we are seeing that sometimes cities are cleaner than nearby villages where household air pollution is dominant,” he said at a summit organised by think-tank Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy.
This makes a strong case for expanding the scope of India’s National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), which currently focuses on non-attainment cities.
Air pollution is a major threat to public health and causes a significant increase in morbidity as well as mortality.
In addition to PM2.5 and PM10, short-lived climate pollutants such as black carbon, methane, ozone and hydrocarbons have the potential to harm the environment and heat the atmosphere more than CO2. Black carbon can cause chronic respiratory diseases, lung cancer, emphysema, pneumonia, asthma, heart disease and low birth weight babies.
“In terms of reducing our life expectancy, globally, PM2.5 is contributing to about 2.3 years of life loss. Right below that is tobacco. In fact, there’s a lot of focus on tobacco and global frameworks for control, but there hasn’t been as much focus on PM2.5 and certainly not as many commitments,” Swaminathan said.
The impact of air pollution is not just limited to people’s health, but its economic cost is also very high. Recently, the World Bank has published a study which states that air pollution has caused a loss of about 8.1 trillion US dollars in 2019, which is 6.1 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP).
Swaminathan said, “We always think of air pollution as a problem, but studies also show that there is a strong economic case for action on clean air. Investing in cleaning up the air has significant positive outcomes in terms of return on investment. We know that air pollution is not only bad for our health, but it is also bad for agriculture, because it reduces sunlight reaching crops, and it is bad for our economy or any country’s economy because it prevents people from visiting, living or moving to those places.”
Kalpana Balakrishnan, director of the World Health Organisation’s Collaborating Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health, said finance is the main barrier to adopting clean cooking fuels, which can help reduce household air pollution levels.
“If we give women free LPG for two years, they are unlikely to revert to biomass cooking even after the subsidy is removed,” he said.
Through the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), launched in May 2016, over 100 million households in India received LPG cylinders by the end of March 2023.
Government data shows that more than 50 per cent of households that received new LPG cylinders under the PMUY did not opt for refilling it even once.
Nearly one-third of the world’s population – 2.4 billion people globally (including 500 million people in India) – still lack access to clean cooking solutions.
Although the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MoPNG) claims that the country’s domestic LPG “coverage” is 99.8 per cent, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) conducted in 2019-21 shows that 41 per cent of the population still cooks on biomass.
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