India has world’s 10 most polluted cities
Asia’s largest economy, China, has long had a reputation for smoggy skies. But these days, neighboring India is fighting the far bigger battle with pollution: The South Asian country is home to the world’s 10 most polluted cities.
Outside India’s capital, New Delhi, Kusum Malik Tomar knows the personal and economic price of breathing some of the world’s most toxic air. At 29, she learned that pollution was the likely driver of the cancer growing inside in her lungs. She had never touched a cigarette. Her husband Vivek sold land to pay for her treatment. They borrowed money from family. Their savings slowly disappeared.
“The government is thinking about the economic growth of the country, but people are dying of diseases or suffering from diseases,” Tomar said. “How can you grow economically
when, within your country, your citizens are facing economic problems because of the air pollution?”
India has long struggled to pull together the type of coordinated national approach that’s helped China reduce pollution. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is now pushing new initiatives it says are starting to curtail hazardous air. But any gains
would have to be enough to override other facets of India’s rampant growth, from the dust left by thousands of new construction sites to exhaust from millions of new cars.
In the coming weeks, the Modi government’s policies on pollution will be put to the test as winter descends on the dusty plains of north India. Crops are burned during this season and millions of fireworks go off during the Diwali festival, usually pushing air pollution to hazardous levels.
If strict policies to battle smog were successfully implemented, India’s citizens and government would be much richer.
By the World Bank’s calculations, health care fees and productivity losses from pollution cost India as much as 8.5 percent of GDP. At its current size of $2.6 trillion that works out to about $221 billion every year.
While India is currently the world’s fastest growing major economy, China’s $12.2 trillion economy is five times larger. The South Asian country is still trying desperately to promote basic manufacturing, which could cause pollution to worsen, said Raghbendra Jha, an Australian National University economics professor.
“It’s too simplistic to assume a smooth transition” to clean economic growth in India, he said.