Cleaning the air

Tackling pollution demands hard decisions

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Soon after the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, conducted cloudseeding tests, an analysis by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD), which comes under the independent research centre Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, offered a sobering assessment of the scale of the issue.

It showed that air pollution accounted for 15 per cent of all deaths in 2023 or that one in seven deaths in Delhi was linked to air pollution - surpassing other major risk factors such as high blood pressure and diabetes. According to the study, exposure to ambient particulate matter pollution led to roughly 17,188 deaths in Delhi as against 15,786 in 2018. As the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finland-based nonprofit, pointed out, air pollution is no longer an environmental issue but a public-health crisis that demands "science-based action".