November has been no different so far.
As air quality declined in recent weeks, respiratory problems skyrocketed in cities, health care app Practo reported.
Delhi, one of the hardest hit cities, saw an increase in COVID-19 cases during the same period. Now, the death toll is also increasing rapidly. The national capital accounted for 21% of all covid-related deaths in the country over the past week, according to the latest update from Mint’s covid tracker.
Even short-term exposure to severe air pollution can cause serious harm, especially during the outbreak of a respiratory infection such as COVID. Research shows that cases of influenza hospitalization and deaths increase in the months of highest contamination.
Currently, there is some research to suggest that covid-19 outbreaks have worsened in more polluted regions.
Our political class has been oblivious to the accumulation of this crisis. Even in a pandemic year, the same old script was fulfilled. When the air quality started to drop, the Delhi prime minister blamed farmers who were burning stubble in neighboring Punjab and Haryana states. The Union Environment Minister dismissed this arguing that burning crops contributes only 4% to the pollution of Delhi-NCR.
That led to a war of words between the two, even as citizens of Delhi and neighboring states like Haryana, where new infections have soared, continued to suffer.
If we consider the entire winter season (November-February), as was done in the ARAI-TERI 2018 study on source distribution, the burning of crops accounts for about 4% of Delhi’s air pollution. But this average figure, on which the environment minister possibly relied, hides important daily differences, and also overlooks the impact of the burning of crops in October, when the burning of stubble is quite high. During the peak phase of stubble burning, crop burning accounts for more than 50% of Delhi’s air pollution, according to data from the Air Quality System and Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR).
Crop burning generally peaks during the period from late October to early November and contributed about 24% of air pollution in the capital in November 2019, said Sumit Sharma of the Institute for Energy and Resources ( TERI) in Delhi. But contributions are episodically high, and therefore the average contribution throughout the winter season is low, he added. Other researchers have also reached similar conclusions that burning crops plays an important role in air pollution in the October to November phase.
Unfavorable weather conditions in late October and early November also exacerbated the capital’s air pollution problem this time. Reduced wind speed and lower temperatures inhibit the dispersion of particulate matter emitted from various sources, worsening the concentration of minute pollutants such as PM2.5. This year, Delhi saw its coldest October in 58 years.
Low wind speed added to the problem.
“In the first week of November, Delhi experienced severe air quality due to northwesterly winds that carried smoke from Punjab to flow into Delhi,” said Kurinji Selvaraj, analyst with the Delhi-based think tank, Council on Energy , Environment and Water (CEEW) During November 10-12, higher wind speeds with a change in wind direction led to an improvement in air quality even as the proportion of stubble burning among pollutants decreased. added.
Bad air in India is not a problem only in winter or only in Delhi, even if the problem peaks in winters and Delhi is more affected than other cities. Most of the country, and particularly the Ganges belt, breathes bad air for much of the year. In winters, this takes the form of a public health emergency. The two problems are interrelated despite the fact that the sources of pollution and meteorological factors that affect the concentration of pollutants in the air tend to be different in different seasons.
14 Indian cities were among the 20 most polluted cities in the world in 2019, according to the air quality portal IQAir.
The contribution of the different pollutants varied, according to an evaluation program of 50 cities carried out by the environmental portal urbanemissions.info the same year. On average, emissions from transportation (18%) and dust (15%) are the dominant pollutants in cities, the assessment found. But a large part of the pollutants enters from the outside.
The data suggest that it is important to consider regional sources of pollution and not just local ones when tackling the problem. Pollution is what economists consider a negative externality: polluting activity in one region imposes damage on another.
The level of damage caused by pollution has been exceptional in India. In 2019 alone, PM2.5 exposure caused around one million deaths in India, according to the State of Global Air 2020 report, published by the Health Effects Institute and the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Exposure to PM2.5 claimed 4.1 million lives worldwide last year. India and China accounted for 58% of these deaths.
Due to prolonged exposure to pollution, diseases such as diabetes, respiratory infections and chronic lung diseases kill many more people in India than in the rest of the world, the GBD study showed. These are also diseases that increase vulnerability to COVID-19, research has shown.
The increase in COVID-19 cases in Delhi and Haryana in recent weeks has given urgency to the debate on air pollution in the national capital. But even without a pandemic, pollution is one of the leading causes of death in India, data shows.
This is the first in a two-part series on India’s pollution problem.
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