In the News
November 23, 2018
This is a classic example of all talk and no work. Every year around this time, we hear lot of noise about smog and pollution. Suddenly the aura of Delhi gets diminished and is portrayed as one of the worst cities to live in. Government agencies, doctors, environmentalists, NGOs, activists and a host of other players, including many foreign universities, suddenly get vocal and bring to the fore myriad of troubles that plague India’s capital and her surrounding regions.
Yes, the problems abound — and there is a funny repetition of the pattern every year — what’s baffling is that we don’t hear or see much by way of action. And who is to blame for this? Many would like to put the onus on the Government. However, the fact is that this is a massive challenge and requires concerted and sustained intervention by each one of us. Else, it shall remain only a matter of academic and media discourse and will lead us into a smoke of perennially lingering threats.
This is why the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) developed by the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman Professor in Economics Michael Greenstone and his team at Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) calculates the effect of air quality on life expectancy. And according to this Index, each one of us living in Delhi could be sacrificing 10 years of our lives to the apathy of the Government and other stakeholders. “The AQLI is an index that translates particulate air pollution into its impact on life expectancy. In Delhi, pollution concentration in 2016 averaged 113 microgram per cubic metre. Based on the research, life expectancy would be more than 10 years longer for people of Delhi of the World Health Organisation (WHO) standards had been met,” said Ken Lee, Executive Director of EPIC India. WHO prescribes the safe limit of annual mean PM 2.5 to 10 micrograms per cubic metre.
For India, the limit was raised to 40 micrograms per cubic metre. However, the PM 2.5 concentration (particles in the air with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres) in Delhi was 114 micrograms per cubic metre in 2016, which is 1.6 times more than 70 micrograms per cubic metre in 1998, the study said. On November 22 morning, the PM2.5 levels were at an alarming 261 as per aqicn.org, a website where you could check the live levels.