Published on : 10 Nov 2025, 6:54 am

Air pollution was the second largest killer globally after blood pressure, recording a dubious tally of 8.1 million deaths in 2021. Of this, a staggering 2.6 million deaths occurred in South Asia alone. To this is added debilitating chronic diseases and a range of ill health. With a population over 1 billion, India recorded 2.1 million deaths, including 237,000 ozone-pollution related deaths. The bigger shocker was the deeply worrying tally of more than 700,000 deaths among children under five years, making air pollution the second leading risk factor after malnutrition globally. As many as 500,000 of these child deaths were linked to household air pollution from cooking indoors using dirty fuels in Africa and Asia. More than 260,600 of these child

See Full Page