NCR's air pollution problem needs hard decisions from states, Centre

The Delhi government's well-meant cloud-seeding experiment to contain pollution must be viewed in this context

Soon after the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, conducted cloud-seeding tests, an analysis by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD), which comes under the independent research centre Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, offered a sobering assessment of the scale of the issue. It showed that air pollution accounted for 15 per cent of all deaths in 2023 or that one in seven deaths in Delhi was linked to air pollution — surpassing other major risk factors such as high blood pressure and diabetes. According to the study, exposure to ambient particulate matter pollution led to roughly