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Indians will live longer if pollution is under check’
Why it is in news?
- More than 660 million Indians live in areas that exceed the country’s standard for what is considered safe exposure to fine particulate pollution (PM 2.5).
- To help improve India’s air quality, researchers from the University of Chicago and Harvard Kennedy School have laid out five key evidence-based policy recommendations in a new report, released , titled ‘A Roadmap Towards Cleaning India’s Air’.
- The group’s recommendations include improving emissions monitoring by better aligning incentives of auditors, providing regulators with real-time data on polluters’ emissions, applying monetary charges for excess emissions, providing the public with information about polluters, and using markets to reduce abatement costs and pollution.
- If India were to achieve its own air quality standards, life expectancy would increase by more than one year on an average, says the 16-page report.
- This number would increase to four years if India were to meet the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) norms.
- Air pollution is causing hundreds of millions of people in India to lead shorter and sicker lives
- EPIC-India researchers have developed the air quality life index (AQLI), a metric that provides a means to predict the overall reduction in life expectancy caused by living in places with high levels of air pollution.
No easy solution
- While the economic costs of pollution are high, and there is no easy solution, we remain optimistic because of the incredible innovations currently being experimented with throughout India.
- Some of the greatest gains would be seen in big cities such as Delhi.
- There, people would live six years longer if air quality met the national standards.
Source
The Hindu