Cities more unhealthy: Environment report

Seventy per cent of Indian rivers are polluted. Underground water in 19 states is contaminated. Air pollution in 90 per cent Indian cities can cause respiratory diseases. Forests in India are depleting, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 12, 2009, 01:54:23 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Seventy per cent of Indian rivers are polluted. Underground water in 19 states is contaminated. Air pollution in 90 per cent Indian cities can cause respiratory diseases. Forests in India are depleting.

This sums up the findings of the State of Environment Report India 2009, released by Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday, the day negotiations for global climate change started in Bonn.

“We may survive the environmental hazards, our children will not, if environment strategies are not implemented in earnest,” said George Varughese, president of NGO Development Alternatives, which prepared the report.

Pollution has increased since 2000, when the last report was released. What’s worrying is the rise in respirable suspended particulate matter (RSPM), a cause of respiratory ailments, in cities due to the increase in vehicles — it has gone up four times from two crore in 1991 — and industrial activity.

“The estimated economic cost of damage to public health from increased air pollution — based on RSPM measurement of 50 cities with a population of 110 million — reached Rs 15,000 crore in 2004,” the report said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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