Category: Health

As New Delhi suffers through a surge in the most harmful type of smog — a toxic stew that makes India’s capital one of the most polluted in the world — Beijing offers lessons in how another troubled city made progress clearing the air.

China, which for more than a decade has been the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, has made its capital the focal point of a clean-up drive. It’s replacing some of its coal-burning facilities with cleaner fuels, encouraging electric vehicles an ..

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Courtesy: The Economic Times

From his office in the smog shrouded city of Lahore, environment official Saif Anjum pores over reams of pollution data and lists the actions being taken by Pakistan’s largest province to combat the toxic air. He said they have arrested hundreds of crop-burning farmers and closed construction sites and industrial furnaces.

But those efforts risk being for naught without collaboration with Pakistan’s nuclear-armed arch-rival India.

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Courtesy: The Economic Times

Soon after the death of 70 infants in a tertiary care hospital in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh (UP), made the headlines last month, similar stories began to pour in from across the country. Ninety children were reported to have died in two months in Rajasthan’s Banswara district hospital; in the month of August alone, 55 children had died in Maharashtra’s Nashik Civil Hospital and 49 in UP’s Farrukhabad District Hospital.

Tragic as these deaths were, they were hardly unusual, IndiaSpend found on visiting half a dozen primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare centres in Jharkhand, another state that reported numerous infant deaths. Doctors told IndiaSpend that such seemingly high child death figures were routine for the months of July and August, when infections peak and already overburdened hospitals are unable to cope.

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Courtesy: The Hindu

Pollution from the Jhamarkotra mines poses a threat to waters near and far, and also causes severe health issues in the miners. Why is there no post facto environment impact assessment?

Huddled in the Aravali range in the southern part of Rajasthan about 26 km from Udaipur, is the largest reserve of phosphate in India. Also known as the Jhamarkotra mines, it is the only commercially exploitable rock phosphate deposit in the country. Phosphate is crucial for the sustenance of fertilizer plants but is available here only between 380 and 600 m below ground level, which can only be reached through deep excavation. The phosphate reserves came up for digging in 1968 when the Rajasthan State Mines and Mineral (RSMM) Corporation initiated open cast mining in the area. The mine, which covers an area of 18.44 sqkm and is divided into eleven blocks, contains approximately 74.68 metric tons of rock phosphate. The land was acquired in the late 1960s and then prepared for mining.

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Courtesy: Your Story