Terming recent, international reports linking air pollution and deaths in India “extrapolations without due scientific validation,” the Environment Ministry said that it was working with the Health Ministry to prepare a comprehensive report on the health impact of pollution.
Two reports last week, one published in the Lancet and the other by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, attribute about a million deaths in India in 2015 to breathing noxious air.
“We seem to be far more influenced by things out of India,” Environment Minister Anil Dave said at a press conference. “We have several of our own organisations and experts…and I trust them as much as I do our Army.”
International studies were important and while the government took note of them, they couldn’t be the final word on the state of pollution in India, he said.
However the Minister and several senior officials of his Ministry and the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) present at the press meet, refused to put a number on probable pollution deaths in the country.
Mr. Dave said that dealing with air pollution “wasn’t rocket science” and that several measures already in place - from cleaning road dust, restricting biomass burning and use of diesel generators, ensuring that industries complied with pollution limits and vehicles used clean fuel—could go a long way in managing pollution.
The municipal authorities and the State governments were constantly being asked to abide by the pollution norms, but “there were limits to what could be achieved within a federal structure.”
India’s National Air Quality Monitoring Programme comprises 680 manual stations spread over 300 cities across the country and was in addition to 54 Continuous Ambient Air Quality monitoring stations in 33 cities. Their readings showed that while particulate matter levels have shown a fluctuating trend, the value of sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide were largely “within permissible limits.”
Other officials, who didn’t want to be identified, said that a systematic study on deaths caused by air pollution was still to be done and international reports were wanting because they made “unwarranted assumptions” when translating particulate matter incidence to premature deaths.
The Lancet and the IHME study relied on the Global Burden of Disease 2015, a report involving 100s of scientists internationally (and India) and World Health Organisation statistics.
To arrive at their estimates of the extent of air pollution, they use data publicly available from organisations such as the CPCB, satellite monitoring techniques and statistical methods that are used to standardise the relative health impact of pollutants ranging from ozone to different grades of particulate matter. Most of the India based studies that exist on the health impact of pollution focus on children and a rise in the incidence of asthma and allergies during spikes in ambient air pollution.
