GUWAHATI According to the research study conducted by one American university, around 27 out of 1,000 infants and children in India die every year due to exposure to dirty cooking fuels in a country that has some of the worst air pollution levels globally.
The scientists cited from Cornell University in New York have also shown that girls are affected more than boys. This does not mean that females are weaker or more vulnerable to diseases caused by breathing polluted air but it means families will be less likely to take their daughters for treatment when they get sick or start coughing.
According to the Cornell University study which referenced the sixth annual World Air Quality Report for 2023, 83 out of the top 100 most polluted cities on earth are found in India. All these Indian cities had pollution levels exceeding ten times the standard recommended by WHO (World Health Organization).
While outdoor air pollution gets a lot of attention, poor indoor air quality is actually much deadlier because we spend most time at home according to Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations.
The research paper titled ‘Cooking Fuel Choice and Child Mortality in India’ was published recently in Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation.
“This paper is unique as it’s given a solid causal estimate of just how many young lives biomass fuel use costs,” said Arnab Basu, lead researcher for this study who works as a professor at Charles H. Dyson School Of Applied Economics And Management at Cornell University.
“We used nationally representative demographic and health survey data spanning over 25 years and could identify all types of polluting fuels used by households,” he said.
The researchers employed household survey data spanning 1992 through to 2016 examining the toll taken on human life due to reliance on unclean cooking fuels with infants below one month being mostly affected. “That’s an age group where lungs are not fully developed and when infants are most closely stuck to their mothers, who are often the primary home cooks,” Mr Basu said.
The mortality effect is much higher for young girls than boys in India because of preferential treatment for boys who fall ill or begin to cough. “A switch to cleaner fuels would not only have a positive impact on overall childhood health, but would also address this neglect of daughters,” he said.
According to the WHO, about a third of the world’s population cooks food over an open fire or in stoves fuelled by biomass (wood, animal dung, and crop waste), contributing to an estimated 3.2 million deaths per year worldwide.
However, it is hard to enforce these changes because “focus is on outdoor air pollution and how crop waste is burned” in India.
“Governments can make laws against crop burning and can give farmers payments in advance to incentivise them not to burn,” Mr Basu said.
This paper highlighted the significance of indoor pollution in almost equal terms with external contamination by taking into account regional factors such as land ownership patterns in agriculture, forest coverage extent, household types or family structures.
