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Over the past two decades, India’s air quality has deteriorated significantly, making air pollution the second largest risk factor contributing to the country’s risk burden. As per the World Health Organization, air quality in India has been deteriorating since the 1990s and by the year 2017, almost 97% of the country’s population was exposed to unhealthy levels of ambient PM2.5. A 2018 report titled, ‘Burden of Disease Attributable to Major Air Pollution Sources in India’ by the Health Effects Institute projects a rise in annual deaths in India due to air pollution from 1.1 million in 2015 to 1.7 million in 2030.
Air pollution affects individual health of citizens, increases mortality and morbidity rates, and contributes to climate change. The India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative by the Public Health Foundation of India, has published a scientific paper on 22 December 2020 on the health and economic impact of air pollution in Lancet Planetary Health, which documents that the economic loss due to lost output from premature deaths and morbidity from air pollution was 1.4% of the GDP in India in 2019, equivalent to INR 260,000 crores (US$ 36.8 billion).
Air pollution inflicts a massive toll on the Indian economy. Its scale, complexity and urgency necessitate a strong, coherent and coordinated fiscal response by the government. However, with recent COVID-19 relief and stimulus packages, there is limited room available for fiscal measures to improve air quality. The need is to create financial architecture backed by private-finance, and adoption of community-based solutions, that can mobilize clean-air solutions in India.
The air pollution crisis will require innovative, collaborative solutions from public, private, and civil society stakeholders. Institutions, governments, philanthropies, and members of the academe have been fighting the battle for clean air for decades; it is time to tap into the power of a multi-stakeholder framework to hurdle this challenge.