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saurabhsaharan
August 13th, 2002, 12:20 AM
Smog cloud threw monsoon off course


RASHMEE Z AHMED

TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ MONDAY, AUGUST 12, 2002 9:30:31 AM ]

LONDON: India and the rest of the South Asian region are covered by a deadly, three-km deep blanket of pollution, which is radically changing monsoon patterns, causing drought, reducing India’s winter rice harvest and literally killing hundreds of thousands of people by respiratory disease, a new study has said.


The report on the ‘Asian Brown Haze’, released here on Monday by scientists working with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said the vast "pollution parcel" could endanger the economic success of South Asian countries, particularly India.


The haze has been identified as a deadly cocktail of ash, acids, aerosols and other particles by 200 scientists, including India’s A P Mitra of the National Phyiscal Laboratory, Professor V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in the United States and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.


The scientists, who believe the worst may be yet to come for the stricken area, said the effects of the haze would intensify over the next 30 years, as South Asia’s population rises to an estimated five billion people.


In the meantime, says the report, higher levels of respiratory diseases are leading to "several hundreds of thousands" of premature deaths, as revealed by data from seven Indian cities, including Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai.


The report said the Indian data suggested some kind of air pollution was responsible for 24,000 annual premature deaths in the early 1990s. Just a few years later, said the report, the number of premature deaths had increased to an estimated 37,000 per year.


Underlining the importance of the new study on the so-called Asian Brown Cloud, UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer warned, "In India they are expecting more than two million people to die because of the incomplete burning of biomass" or the open fires used by the majority of ordinary Indians to cook their food.


Toepfer stressed that the Asian haze was largely "the result of forest fires, the burning of agricultural wastes, dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations and emissions from millions of inefficient cookers burning wood, cow dung and other ‘bio fuels’."


The scientists, who are calling for an action plan to address the threats across Asia as a whole, have also frightened much of Europe by the suggestion that the Asian haze has "global implications".


On Monday, Toepfer pointed out to a shocked Europe that "a pollution parcel like this, which stretches three kilometres high, can travel half way round the globe in a week".


Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth have been calling for India and other affected countries to be helped to popularise solar cookers among the poor.


Roger Hingman of Friends of the Earth also criticised the West for selling "cars to the middle classes in India".


The UNEP says Project Asian Brown Cloud should establish observatories to study the haze as well as its impact on agricultural, health and water budget.