Air Pollution In India: Major Issues And Challenges
Energy Future|January - March 2021
As per a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health Journal, in 2019, air pollution ‘caused more than 16.7 lakh deaths in India — over ten times more than the country’s COVID-19 death toll so far’. In this thought-provoking article, Dr Bhola Ram Gurjar foregrounds the challenges India is currently facing to bring the level of air quality to a certain standard and discusses solutions that could be adopted to combat the national crisis.
Dr Bhola Ram Gurjar
Air Pollution In India: Major Issues And Challenges

Introduction

Rising urbanization, booming industrialization, and associated anthropogenic activities are the prime reasons that lead to air pollutant emissions and poor air quality. It is expected that by 2030, around 50% of the global population will be residing in urban areas (Gurjar, Butler, Lawrence, et al. 2008). More than 80% of population in urban areas is exposed to emissions that exceed the standards set by World Health Organization (WHO 2016). Air pollution is one of the key global health and environmental concerns (Nagpure, Gurjar, Kumar, et al. 2016) and has been ranked among the top five global risk factors of mortality by the Health Effects Institute (HEI 2019). According to HEI’s report, particulate matter (PM) pollution was considered the third important cause of death in 2017 and this rate was found to be highest in India. Air pollution was considered to cause over 1.1 million premature deaths in 2017 in India (HEI 2019), of which 56% was due to exposure to outdoor PM2.5 concentration and 44% was attributed to household air pollution. As per WHO (2016), one death out of nine in 2012 was attributed to air pollution, of which around three million deaths were solely due to outdoor air pollution.

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Air Pollution In India: Major Issues And Challenges
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