The
first comprehensive estimates of deaths, disease burden, and life expectancy
reduction associated with air pollution in each state of India was published on
December 6, 2018 in the British on-line journal,
The Lancet Planetary Health.
The findings are from the India State-Level
Disease Burden Initiative, a joint research of the Indian Council of Medical
Research, Public Health Foundation of India, and Institute for Health Metrics
and Evaluation (US) in collaboration with the Union Ministry of Health and
Family Welfare.
The key findings of the report are:
· One
out of every eight deaths in India is attributable to air pollution.
· over
half of the 12.4 lakh deaths in India attributable to air pollution in 2017
were in persons younger than 70 years.
· The
average life expectancy in India would have been 1.7 years higher if the air
pollution level were less than the minimal level causing health loss.
· Air
pollution now contributes to more disease burden in India than tobacco use,
primarily through causing lower respiratory infections, chronic obstructive
lung disease, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, and lung cancer.
· 77%
of India’s population is exposed to outdoor air pollution levels above the
National Ambient Air Quality Standards safe limit, with the northern states
having particularly high levels.
· Exposure
to household air pollution due to solid fuel use for cooking is decreasing in
India with the increasing provision of clean cooking fuel; this effort needs to
be sustained to address the still high levels of this exposure in several less
developed states.
· Systematic
efforts are necessary to address the multiple sources of air pollution in
India: transport vehicles, construction activity, industry and thermal power
emissions, residential and commercial solid fuel use, waste and agriculture
burning, diesel generators, and manual road dust sweeping.
· India
has one of the highest annual average ambient particulate matter PM2.5 exposure
levels in the world. In 2017, no state in India had an annual population
weighted ambient particulate matter mean PM2.5 less than the WHO recommended
level of 10 μg/m³. (PM 2.5 particles are those that are suspended in air and
have a diameter lesser than 2.5 microns.)
· In
2017, 77% of India’s population was exposed to mean PM2.5 more than 40 μg/m³,
which is the recommended limit set by the National Ambient Air Quality
Standards of India.
Variation across states
There was a marked variation between the
states with regard to ambient particulate matter pollution and household air
pollution. States in north India had some of the highest levels of both ambient
particulate matter and household air pollution, especially Bihar, Uttar
Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand; and Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab in north
India had some of the highest ambient particulate matter pollution exposure in
the country.
A contiguous group of states in central,
western and northern India has emerged with the highest death-rates
attributable to air pollution. Rajasthan tops the list with 112 deaths per lakh
population, followed by Uttar Pradesh (111), Uttarakhand (106) and Haryana
(100), while Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh each had 97-100
such deaths per lakh in 2017.
At the lower end of the scale are several of
the Northeastern states — including Arunachal Pradesh (36), Meghalaya (43),
Nagaland (49) – while Union territories other than Delhi show a
pollution-related death rate of 48.5. While Manipur and Mizoram too figure on
the lower side of the list, Tripura had a high rate (91) and Assam’s rate was
72 per lakh, higher than Delhi’s 65. Death rates in the southern states ranged
between a high of 95 in Karnataka and a low of 66 in Telangana. Among other
larger states, the death rate was 93 in West Bengal and in the 80s in
Maharashtra and Gujarat.
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