Deadly Air Pollution in India
The article I found for this week’s blog is about the pollution problem in India. Air quality in India has decreased drastically over the past decade and is continuing to get worse while causing major health problems to India’s people. More than a million people in India die each year from indoor air pollution and around 620,000 people because of outdoor pollution. An additional study found that air pollution causes 20% of lung cancers and 6% of high blood pressure cases. The air quality of homes in rural India is ten times worse than the indoor air quality guidelines of the United States Environment Protection Agency.
The article reports that poor indoor air quality is due to tobacco smoking in the home and to the solid fuels used for cooking. "Around one million lives, especially of women, can be saved every year in India, if all solid fuels used for cooking in rural India is replaced with LPG.” Rising particle matter in outdoor air pollution has made this a hazard for human health, and air pollution is now ranked the fifth biggest cause of deaths in India. The Central Pollution Control Board in India claims that only two cities monitored by them have an air quality worth breathing. These cities are Malapuram and Pathanamthitta.
This article is missing some important information to guide the reader in knowing what the causes of the pollution problem are. The article gives a couple of examples, like indoor tobacco smoking and the solid fuels used for cooking, but that doesn’t tell the reader anything about outdoor pollution factors.
The pollution problem in India is a major social problem. Just in the past decade, the air quality in India has decreased exponentially compared to the decades prior. Could this increase in pollution be a product of globalization? The fact that India has a worse indoor air quality than many other countries outdoor air quality is a new idea to me. This is the first time I have considered indoor air quality when thinking about air quality and pollution problems.
Carly Taylor
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