In the News
January 3, 2019
India’s death and disease burden due to air pollution, an “under-appreciated contributor” to ill health, is disproportionately high, a study has said, underscoring that toxic air prematurely kills 11 percent of people younger than 70 years.
Of the total deaths in India in 2017, 1.24 million deaths, equivalent to 12·5 percent of total mortalities, could be attributed to air pollution, said the paper by the India State Level Disease Burden Initiative, published in The Lancet in December.
This means air pollution is responsible for one out of every eight deaths in India.
These fatalities include 0·67 million deaths due to outdoor particulate matter pollution while 0·48 million human lives are snuffed out due to household air pollution.
Connecting the dots on air pollution, death and disease burden, the study revealed that India comprised 18 percent of the global population in 2017, but had 26 percent of global DALYs (a measure of disease burden) attributable to air pollution.
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According to an Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) study, which developed the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI), on average, people in India would live 4.3 years longer if their country met the WHO guideline—expanding the average life expectancy at birth there from 69 to 73 years.
They say the impact of particulate pollution on life expectancy is comparable to that of smoking, twice that of alcohol and drug use, three times that of unsafe water, five times that of HIV/AIDS, and more than 25 times that of conflict and terrorism.
“Over the past two decades, the concentration of fine particulates increased by 69 percent on average across India. As a result, sustained exposure to particulate pollution now reduces the life expectancy of the typical Indian citizen by 4.3 years compared to 2.2 years in 1998,” the EPIC study had said.