Abstract
Accelerating growth due to industrialization and urbanization has improved the Indian economy but simultaneously has deteriorated human health, environment, and ecosystem. In the present study, the associated health risk mortality (age > 25) and welfare loss for the year 2017 due to excess PM2.5 concentration in ambient air for 31 major million-plus non-attainment cities (NACs) in India is assessed. The cities for the assessment are prioritised based on population and are classified as ‘X’ (> 5 million population) and ‘Y’ (1–5 million population) class cities. Ground-level PM2.5 concentration retrieved from air quality monitoring stations for the NACs ranged from 33 to 194 µg/m3. Total PM2.5 attributable premature mortality cases estimated using global exposure mortality model was 80,447 [95% CI 70,094–89,581]. Ischemic health disease was the leading cause of death accounting for 47% of total mortality, followed by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD-17%), stroke (14.7%), lower respiratory infection (LRI-9.9%) and lung cancer (LC-1.9%). 9.3% of total mortality is due to other non-communicable diseases (NCD-others). 7.3–18.4% of total premature mortality for the NACs is attributed to excess PM2.5 exposure. The total economic loss of 90,185.6 [95% CI 88,016.4–92,411] million US$ (as of 2017) was assessed due to PM2.5 mortality using the value of statistical life approach. The highest mortality (economic burden) share of 61.3% (72.7%) and 30.1% (42.7%) was reported for ‘X’ class cities and North India zone respectively. Compared to the base year 2017, an improvement of 1.01% and 0.7% is observed in premature mortality and economic loss respectively for the year 2024 as a result of policy intervention through National Clean Air Action Programme. The improvement among 31 NACs was found inconsistent, which may be due to a uniform targeted policy, which neglects other socio-economic factors such as population, the standard of living, etc. The study highlights the need for these parameters to be incorporated in the action plans to bring in a tailored solution for each NACs for better applicability and improved results of the programme facilitating solutions for the complex problem of air pollution in India.
Highlights
Air pollution has globally become a leading reason accounting for 22–53% of all deaths from cardiovascular diseases (CVD), ischemic heart diseases (IHD), stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer (LC)[1]
Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) exchange rates was retrieved for the year 2017 was used to convert Indian Nation Rupee (INR₹) to US Dollar (US$). ‘ ε ’ is the elastic coefficient of willingness to pay (WTP) and is considered 1.051,52. ‘ β ’ is the income elasticity and is recommended to be 0.853,54
The study quantifies the potential monetary benefits based on target scenarios suggested in National Clean Air Programme(NCAP) for the year 2024
Summary
Industrialization activity together with unfavourable meteorological c onditions[5,6,7,8] are the prime reasons for increased health burden due to air pollution. Health risk cases owing to air pollution in Indian cities were estimated previously by several researchers[9,16,63,75,76] Most of these studies were limited to the assessment of health endpoints without extending the scope towards monetary burden estimation. The study was formulated in a way to facilitate such intervention with an overall objective to (1) Estimate the monetary loss due to premature mortality attributed to air pollution (Excess P M10 & P M2.5) in major million-plus ‘X’ and ‘Y’ class NACs of India (Fig. 1) for the year 2017. To reduce the complexity of the study by including all the NACs, it was decided to consider all ‘X’ class NACs with at least one major ‘Y’ class NACs having the highest population for all the states of India and were chosen based on the Non-attainment list published by Central Pollution Control Board (https://cpcb.nic.in/uploads/Non-Attainment_Cities.pdf) and Sixth Central Pay Commission’s city classification (https://doe.gov.in/sites/default/files/21-07-2015.pdf)
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