Air Quality - All 10 Of The World's Most Polluted Cities Are In India
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.
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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.
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When Arvind Kumar of New Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital started as a chest surgeon in 1988, 90 percent of his lung cancer patients were middle-aged male smokers. Now, he says, 60 percent of his cases are non-smokers, while half are women. Tiny airborne particles have been linked to ailments from asthma to heart disease and lung cancer, contributing to the deaths of more than 1.1 million Indians in 2015, according to the nonprofit Health Effects Institute.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-21/the-world-s-fastest-growing-economy-has-the-world-s-most-toxic-air?srnd=premium
