Coal and dirty development in China and India leads to 1.6 million extra air pollution deaths a year
As winter sets in and smog envelopes the North Indian belt further, yet another damning report stresses on the urgent need to address the problem of air pollution in India and China. The report by Greenpeace India has found that air pollution due to continued use of fossil fuels, (coal in particular) in both the countries has caused an additional 1.6 million more deaths than the projected figure based on GDP growth rate for the year 2015 . Air pollution due to continued usage of fossil fuels denies both India and China the fruits of a flourishing economy. The report puts a big question mark on the quality of economic development that the two countries are offering their people. Usually, air pollution has an inverse relationship with the country’s GDP; find that as countries become richer they generally develop less polluting industries. But in the case of India and China, the trend has been quite the opposite: despite their economic growth, both countries have particularly poor air quality. It is clear that an economy heavily reliant on coal can only spell doom for its people.