Pollution takes its toll globally
The Lancet published a report on October 20 on pollution and the havoc it causes in peoples' lives at a global level. The facts are mindboggling. It kills the poor and vulnerable and 92 percent of pollution-related deaths are in middle-income and lower-middle income countries. While the most of the death toll comes from China and India, rapidly industrialising countries such as Bangladesh record a massive one out of every four deaths from pollution.
When we talk about pollution, it is not just outdoor pollution, but indoor too. As the poor and ultra-poor are more adversely affected, we have to take into account the unhealthy manner with which we cook our food indoors. A miniscule fraction of the population has access to piped gas or LPG cylinders to cook. Although both government and non-government agencies have been trying to introduce clean cooking stoves at household level for some time now, the fact is that "clean" technology like this have not been adopted nationwide.
We now know that there is even workplace pollution where people are exposed to toxins and carcinogens linked to 0.8 million deaths out of a total of 6.5 million deaths worldwide. While exact data on how many people in Bangladesh are dying due to pollution of different kinds is not known, we do know that our public policies on pollution remain ineffective. We have ample laws and rules that are supposed to check pollution. But in the absence of proper enforcement, there is no way to check the rising death toll. We hope the findings of the report serve as a wakeup call at the policy level because deaths by pollution is estimated to be costing developing countries (like Bangladesh) an estimated 8.3 percent of their gross national income.
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