In South Asia, Vehicle Exhaust, Agricultural Burning and In-Home Cooking Produce Some of the Most Toxic Air in the World

In 2014, the World Health Organization stated that New Delhi was one the most polluted places in the world. The city had dangerous levels PM2.5, which is fine particulate matter pollution. Since then, New Delhi has been synonymous for hazardous air quality. 

Over the last few years the air quality levels in one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises have ebbed and flowed, but for the most part New Delhi’s pollution levels remain higher than most cities across the world. 

The annual World Air Quality Report of IQAir, a Swedish monitoring company for air quality, has been released. This report again ranks New Delhi amongst the most polluted cities and capital cities for the fourth year in a row. IQAir also found that South Asia was the world’s most polluted region, where PM2.5 emissions from vehicle exhaust, commerce, the burning of stalks and other crop residue after harvest season and in-home cooking with solid fuels all combine to dangerously degrade air quality. 

“You can barely see the leaves anymore, there’s a layer of dust that covers them all the time,” said Renu Singh, 39, a Ph.D student at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, describing the visible effects of air pollution in the city. 

Singh, who has lived in Delhi her entire life, has witnessed the city grow to a metropolis of more than 30,000,000 people. Data suggests Delhi’s population will likely surpass Tokyo’s by the year 2030 and reach 39 million. As the city grows, so does its problem with air pollution. 

According to the University of Chicago’s 2019 Air Quality Life Index (2019 Air Quality Index), Delhi residents will lose more than nine years of their life expectancy should pollution levels continue to rise after 2019. The World Health Organization associates many short- and long-term health risk factors with exposure to PM2.5, tiny droplets of pollution smaller than 2.5 microns—about one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair—that irritate the eyes, nose and lungs, aggravate asthma and other respiratory diseases and increase the risk of death from lung cancer and heart disease.

These particles are caused by vehicle exhaust, burning of fuels like wood, heating oil, or coal, as well as natural sources such grass and wildfires. 

Global Burden of Disease (comparative risk assessment) estimates that pollution has contributed to more than 1.6million deaths in India, 128,000 deaths in Pakistan, and 123,000 deaths in Bangladesh. According to a Greenpeace Southeast Asia analysis IQAir data, air pollution caused more than 50,050 deaths in New Delhi in 2020.

Some of the most toxic air in the world 

While Delhi dominates the air quality conversation in the region, the deadly air problem isn’t exclusive to the city, or India. Forty-six of the planet’s 50 most polluted cities are located in South Asia. 

The region’s other major capital cities—Dhaka, in Bangladesh; Kathmandu, in Nepal;  Islamabad, in Pakistan; and Kabul, in Afghanistan—were among the top 15 most polluted capitals in 2021. Simply put, South Asia is suffering from some of the worst air quality in the world. The Indo-Gangetic plain is the most affected area due to the high levels of pollution in the region. This 700-kilometer-long stretch includes the floodplains from the Gangabrahmaputra and Indus Rivers in northern and eastern India, Bangladesh, Bangladesh, and southern Nepal.

The University of Chicago Air Quality Life Index estimated that hazardous air quality levels have decreased life expectancy in the Indo–Gangetic plain by seven year. The plain is one of the most densely populated areas in the world and is home to more 500 million people. It also serves as the hub for small, medium, and large scale economic activity throughout South Asia. 

“Most unfortunately, we don’t have the abating influences of a coast, either,” said Karthik Ganesan, a fellow and director of  research coordination at The Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a nonprofit think tank based in New Delhi. 

The air quality in this region is often poor. It is measured using the Air Quality Index (AQI), which is used by United States Environmental Protection Agency to measure particulate matter pollution, ground level ozone, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. Based on a scale from 0 to 100, the air quality measurement categorizes anything above 150 as unhealthy, around 201 as very healthy, and above 301 as dangerous. Air quality levels on the Indo-Gangetic plain rarely drop below 100 during the year. Winters are more severe and levels often exceed 150  

The core of the problem is vehicles

In Delhi and the region’s other vast cities, dark clouds of exhaust rise from streets choked with new and old cars, taxis, trucks, buses and motorbikes. “Transport and economic activity is really to blame at the core of it,” said Ganesan. 

The Odd Even Rule has been introduced and reintroduced by the New Delhi government over the years. This road space rationing policy was first introduced in Beijing in 2008. It was intended to limit the number cars that could be on the roads on particularly hazy days. Motor vehicles with odd or even registration numbers are permitted to use the roads on odd or even days of each week. 

In 2019, however, the Supreme Court of India raised doubts about the rule’s effectiveness, citing the many exemptions that apply to two- and three wheelers. Kathmandu applied the rule the same year during the opening-and-closing days of the South Asian Games.

Lahore is the second-largest city in Pakistan, with more than 11,000,000 residents and 5 million vehicles registered, has pollution levels similar to Delhi. It also lacks comprehensive city policies for addressing transport pollution. “When you have weak standards there is no incentive to turn to better technology,” said Sanval Nasim, assistant professor of economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Millions of people commute to and from Delhi every day by using the metro, a mass transit system which serves the capital and neighboring cities. It also allows them to use the more than 12,000,000 registered motor vehicles. The city was the first in India to adopt the European Union’s fuel efficiency standards, used by many high income countries around the world. 

Efforts are underway in Delhi to electrify the city’s fleet, but “it’s a very multisectoral, complex problem which won’t get tackled overnight,” said Gunjan Jain, communication lead for air quality and climate impacts at Climate Trends, a New Delhi-based communications and capacity building initiative with a focus on environment, climate change and sustainable development.  

Burning crops, agriculture and other factors

Every winter, farmers across northern India, Pakistan and the bordering areas set fire to the fields with stalks, leaves, and other debris from the harvest. As the rains recede, the winds become stronger and the weather becomes drier, the region is choked by smog from crop-burning. This post-harvest burning in Punjab on both sides of the India-Pakistan border and in the state of Haryana in India contributes greatly to the Indo-Gangetic plain’s worsening air quality. 

When farmers set fire to leftover stalks of the harvested crop in preparation for the next season’s planting, air quality levels on both Pakistan and India’s sides of the Indo-Gangetic plain reach hazardous levels more than 10 times thicker with PM2.5 than World Health Organization guidelines. IQAir reported that there were more than 4,000 agriculture fires burning along a 409-kilometer stretch of land between Delhi (India) and Lahore (India). However, pollution is often seen as a problem in big cities by farmers.

“We need to be cognizant that just a blanket ban on these activities will not get us anywhere,” said Jain. 

Ganesan, New Delhi’s Council on Energy, Environment and Water, said that the solution lies with determining which crops are most suitable for the region and reducing the amount of residue. Rice, which is widely harvested in Pakistan and Indian Punjab, is not the solution. “Rice growing is not traditional in Punjab,” he said. Rice has become a popular crop because of the rising demand for basmati all over the world. There are subsidies for fertilizer, no taxation and no penalty for drawing large amounts of water for the harvest.

“Currently the government has a very ad hoc approach to this,” said Nasim of the provincial government in Pakistan. During crop burning season the province declares an emergency and officials from the Provincial Disaster Management Authority register complaints against farmers engaging in the practice, and “that’s not a very cost effective or long term way of dealing with the problem,” Nasim added.

The Absence of Policy and Environmental Justice

Government policy also misses the mark when it comes to addressing pollution as an environmental justice issue affecting low-income people, be it Bangladesh’s draft policy on Air Pollution, Pakistan’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards or India’s National Clean Air Program. 

“There is a gap in recognizing the scale of the problem at the governance level and at the level of the implementing authorities,” said Jain. 

It is not easy to miss the connection.

According to an air quality and environment injustice study published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, January 2021, India’s pollution risks are greater for the poor and vulnerable. “Good quality air becomes a luxury,” said Singh, pointing to avoidance behavior by economically advantaged groups with the capacity to purchase air purifiers and remain indoors on bad air quality days. 

“Anecdotally, one can assume that poor neighborhoods are much more exposed to bad air quality,” said Nasim, the assistant professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Experts note that rural and economically disadvantaged households are more likely to use solid fuel for cooking than those who live in close quarters. “Thirty percent of ambient air pollution in India comes from what gets burned inside households,” said Ganesan. 

In 2016, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas in India established a nationwide scheme that provided subsidized Liquified Petroleum Gas connection for low-income households as a replacement for solid fuels. However, as LPG prices fell during Covid-19, the government removed those subsidies. “The government decided I’ve got other priorities to support, I am not going to support subsidized LPG anymore,” said Ganesan.

All three of the South Asia experts, Ganesan Jain, Nasim and Nasim agree that South Asia’s problems often come down to implementation. “Every environmental problem that India and South Asia faces today is part of this bigger puzzle and if we can’t look at it in this manner, we may not be able to solve it in finite time,” said Ganesan.