Toxic Living~ II

While trucks and other heavy vehicles have been recognised as a major contributor to air pollution, in India, freight movement by rail has declined, giving way to a road-based freight system dominated by trucks. Rapid expansion of roads and highways has given impetus to road transport. The share of railways in 1950-51 was 89 per cent, which declined to 27 per cent in 2022

- JAYDEV JANA

According to the 2010 Global Burden of Diseases (GBD), published by the WHO, indoor air pollution is the second largest killer in India after blood pressure, claiming two lives every minute. The report entitled State of Global Air 2018 based on GBD has estimated that long-term exposure to outdoor and indoor pollution air pollution, the so called ‘double burden’, has contributed to around 6.1 million premature deaths from stroke, heart attacks, lung cancer and chronic lung diseases. A paper in The Lancet Planetary Health also says that household air pollution is responsible for 40 per cent of air pollution deaths in India. Fine particles or PM2.5 are primarily responsible for the disease burden. Long-term exposure to air pollution contributes to increased risk of illness and death from a multitude of diseases.

In 2019, as many as 6.67 million people died due to air pollution in the world out of which 1.67 million deaths occurred due to this reason in India. Share of deaths (in percentage terms) in India stack up as follows: lower respiratory infection (44 per cent), lung cancer (32 per cent), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (60 per cent), neo-natal outcomes (21), with some overlap in these figures. Moreover, over the past two decades, deaths attributable to ambient PM2.5 in India has increased by 2.5 times and deaths attributable to ozone have increased by 2.9 times.

The Air Quality Index (AQI) measures air pollution levels, indicating how clean or polluted the air is. Its calculation is based on five major pollutants; (1) Particulate matters (PM2.5 and PM10); (2) Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2); (3) Ozone (O3); (4) Carbon Monoxide (CO) and (5) Sulphur Dioxide (SO2). Relations among AQI value, category and health risks have been shown in