It would be less than appropriate to engage in a discourse on which of the two is more lethal. Yet figures for 2019, published recently in the reputed journal of science, The Lancet, are direly unnerving.
It must be more than a little shocking to learn that air pollution resulted in 11 times the number of deaths around the world that year than the Covid- 19 pandemic in 2020.
An enormous responsibility thus devolves on the pollution control authorities not merely to tackle the burning of stubble, as in north India, the bursting of crackers in Kolkata and other parts of the country during Diwali or for that matter the presence of noxious coal-fired power plants.
Two years ago, the deaths on account of pollution had outnumbered the country’s Covid casualties this year by a substantial margin. The report states that 16.7 lakh people died due to pollution in 2019, much more than the 1.5 lakh claimed by Covid in 2020.
In addition, India lost 1.4 per cent of its GDP due to premature deaths and morbidity linked to pollution. The Lancet had collaborated with the Indian Council of Medical Research, Public Health Foundation of India and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation while crafting this report.
The report makes it clear that while public health authorities must combat the virus, they need to do more, much more, to tackle pollution which can only be addressed by the vaccine of development.
This must be an unnerving thought on the first anniversary, so to speak, of Covid-19. As the world debates the efficacy of the corona vaccine, there is no such medical antidote against pollution.
According to the medical fraternity, “air pollution has clearly emerged as one of the biggest killers in India. There is a long-drawn collective battle against it. A couple of doses of vaccine cannot prevent it. Covid-19 has occupied the lion’s share of our mindspace.”
In the reckoning of the Centre for Science and Environment, pollution is particularly acute across the Indo-Gangetic plain. And then the stern caveat seemingly riveted to West Bengal ~ “Bengal being at the tail-end of the plain needs proactive steps to speed up action on transport, clean fuels in industry, clean power plants, waste management and biomass burning across the state.”
Sad to reflect that West Bengal has failed on every parameter. Not wholly unrelated is what health authorities call an “alarming rise in non-smoking patients” basically because of indoor and outdoor pollution. “This is a bigger epidemic but currently going unnoticed because of our current obsession with Covid-19.”
Such obsessions may seem to be a very humane response. While indoor pollution caused 64 per cent fewer deaths over the past two decades, outdoor pollution more than made up. Overall, the very real threat of air pollution needs to be addressed urgently.