The WHO Report on Polluted Cities in India Sounds a Dire Warning

Aggressive national and state-level action needed.
“The report by World Health Organization (WHO )is a warning about the serious and run-away pollution and public health emergency that confronts India today,” remarked Sunita Narain, Director General, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), responding to the latest urban air quality database 2016 released by the WHO.
The database says that of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, the top 14 are in India which is really very important and shocking.
Says Anumita Roychowdhury, Executive Director-Research and Advocacy, CSE: “This is a grim reminder that air pollution has become a national public health crisis. Urgent intervention is needed for implementing the National Clean Air Action Plan with a strong compliance strategy to meet the clean air standards in all cities. It requires hard and very prompt action.”
CSE says real-time air quality monitoring, especially that of PM2.5, will have to be expanded significantly to assess air quality in all cities with sizeable population. Out of the 5,000 odd cities and towns in India, monitoring is being done in only 307 cities – moreover, most of this is manual monitoring that reports data with considerable time lag.
Says Anumita Roychowdhury: “State governments will also have to wake up to ensure action plans are implemented with utmost stringency and aggression. India needs massive energy transition across industries and households, mobility transition to public transport, walking and cycling, and effective waste management to control this run-away pollution.”
Frequent unhealthy level of pollution from sources ranging from vehicles to the burning of coal and wood for cooking, dust storms, or forest fires affect most of the country. India’s hills and mountains also act as basins that trap toxic air over vast swaths of the country, sometimes making the air too dangerous to breathe. Delhi, India’s capital region, home to nearly 19 million people, is notorious for choking air that is now turning the iconic white marble walls of the Taj Mahal green.
The city faced a major air quality crisis late last year as the literally off-the-chart-pollution forced flight cancellations, caused traffic accidents, closed schools, and sparked protests. One minister described Delhi as a “gas chamber” and the city declared a public health emergency.
As for India’s sudden rise in the rankings, a big factor is that pollution in many of these cities is being measured and reported for the first time, meaning the problem may have always been there but hadn’t drawn the same level of attention.
With more measurements and reporting, India’s pollution problems will likely appear worse before they get better. But gathering this information is nonetheless vital for the counteroffensive against poor air quality. Dozens of other Indian cities are dealing with severe pollution too, but many of the particulates that blanket the metro regions originate in rural areas, and rural areas are just as badly affected by poor air, if not more so. In 2015, about 75 percent of death linked to air pollution in India, some 1.1 million people, occurred in rural areas.
Two third of India’s population still live outside of cities, and 80 percent of these households rely on biomass like wood and dung for cooking and heating. Agricultural practices like burning crop strubble also remain widespread. This smoke can then waft over major cities such as Chennai and Mumbai, where it commingles with traffic exhaust, factory emissions, and construction dust. It can also get trapped by inland by features like hills and mountains, leaving few areas in the country where Indians can breathe easy.
> Pratyusha Mukherjee, Kolkata, India