The health bill from crop burning is Rs 2 lakh crore annually.
India’s five-year air-pollution-related health bill from burning crop stubble can pay for about 700 premier All India Institutes of Medical Sciences or India’s 2019 central government health budget nearly 21 times over, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of data from a new study.
Burning of crop residue or stubble remains a key contributor to air pollution over northern India, despite a ban by the National Green Tribunal in November 2015. It will cost the country over Rs 2 lakh crore annually, or three times India’s central health budget, or Rs 13 lakh crore over five years – equal to 1.7% of India’s gross domestic product and enough to build 700 AIIMS hospitals, according to a 2019 study by the International Food Policy Research Institute, a research advocacy headquartered in America’s Washington DC.
Crop-residue burning causes a collective loss of 14.9 million years of healthy life among the 75 million residents of Delhi, Haryana and Punjab – 72.5 days or a fifth of a year per person in the three states – whose risk for acute respiratory infection rises threefold due to exposure to pollution, the study says.
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