3.2 Years. That's The Amount Of Time You Could Add To Your Life If Our Air Quality Improved

A new study has concluded as many as 660 million people or half of India's population could add 3.2 years to their lifespan, if air quality met the national safe standard. In other words, compliance with standards can save up to 2.1 billion life years in India.
Authored by Michael Greenstone, Director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago with prominent economists and public policy experts from Yale and Harvard University, the study looks at air quality data in different parts of the country from pollution control boards and satellite data.

The study using the 2011 census data estimates that 660 million people (54.5% of the population) live in regions that do not meet the annual PM 2.5 (fine, respirable pollution particles) standard of 40 microgramme per cubic metre, and 262 million people (21.7% of the population) live in regions with air pollution levels more than twice this standard. Nearly every Indian (1,204 million people, or 99.5% of the population) lives in an area with PM 2.5 pollution above the World Health Organisation's 10 microgramme per cubic metre guideline.

The authors have considered several scientific studies from different parts of the world that demonstrate a link between particulate pollution and mortality rates. The study, however, arrived at the life expectancy figures using an earlier study by Greenstone conducted in China, in which he and his co-authors had compared pollution in north China - where a policy existed of subsidizing coal for home heating - to south China where there was no such policy. Through this study, he was able to separate the effect of pollution to an extent from other factors of mortality. It had inferred that with every additional 100 micrograms of total suspended particulate (TSP) matter per cubic meter in the atmosphere, life expectancy at birth was lowered by three years.

The same metric was applied to Indian data of PM 2.5 levels for this study, which has just been published in the Economic and Political Weekly.

"India's focus is necessarily on growth. But for too long the conventional definition of growth has ignored the health consequences of air pollution," said Michael Greenstone. "The study shows that air pollution retards growth by causing people to die prematurely. Other studies have also shown that air pollution reduces productivity at work, increases incidence of sick days, and raises health care expenses that could be devoted to other goods."
The authors, who include Nicholas Ryan of Yale, Janhavi Nilekani and Anish Sugathan of Harvard, and Anant Sudarshan, director of EPIC's India office, recommend three policy measures for the Indian government.

The first is to increase real-time air quality monitoring stations in all parts of the country. It quotes the example of Beijing, which has 35 monitoring stations, while Kolkata, the city with the highest number of monitoring stations in India, has only 20.
"Increased monitoring can play an important role as a health advisory system and as a means of increasing pressure on polluters to comply with existing regulations," the study said.

The second intervention they recommend is to rely on civil instead of criminal penalties to "instill a polluter pays" system and ensure that polluters comply. The authors also said that many environmental laws are built on an outdated criminal system with penalties such as imprisonment or closure of industries, which are often difficult to enforce.
Third, they recommend market based mechanisms for environmental regulation like the emissions trading system (ETS), based on rigorous monitoring of pollution and financial penalties.

Originally published in Times Of India