37.5 Million Indians Suffer From Breathing, Half The Size of Britain’s Population

By D N Singh

Just a day has passed we commemorated the World Health Day and many claims have been made how India has made strides on the health sector. So also the World.

It is not an attempt at put forth a contrarian view but a mere stride into an area and in totality getting a picture which appears to be dismal.

In more advanced nations a parameter is set by the number of people visiting a physician for treatment. It may be a numeric puzzle but it gives us a substantive view about the health of majority of people in India.

Posterity Easy Targets

Climate change has become a big, big threat and the menace has assumed an irreversible dimension in recent times. Hardly one would believe that, majority in India has started suffering from breathing problem and the worst victim have become the children of our country.

Not that the Covid has impacted but such statistics was much before the outbreak of the pandemic that 52 per cent of Indians had breathing related problems. And it became worse in the case of children when India reported above 65 percent paediatric cases with breathing difficulties.

Do our children breathe Toxics? Yes, they do. The number of deaths mainly from respiratory ailments coupled with other related disorders account for a mammoth average which is about more than 2 times than the world average.

An Irreversible Menace

If the rate of climate change get accelerated like this, then the situation can be worse in the days to come.

Climate change has ushered in many things in addition to the increasing emissions such as air pollution, industrial, vehicular and so on and which had led to a situation when more than 63 million Indians fall victim to breathing problem alone! What is pathetic that, it has brought in a situation when the children have become the soft targets of this disorder.

One in five deaths among them is related to breathing problems. And the pace of climate change has become so fast that, findings say that, more than 90 percent children in the world are victims of toxic air. Unbelievable but that is what the realities show.

Pollution are many but certain pollutions those can be controlled are not being addressed. Specifically, pollutions related carbon emission, dust, insects like cockroaches and mites have remained major cause for infections in India those could have been controlled.

The year 2016 was a revealer when more than 5 lakh children in the world died due to pollutions in the air leading to breathing problems and shockingly they were under the age of 5 years.

Now is time when India must rise above the spree of sloganeering and the nations must find the will to do allocate funds at fighting the climate change through control over above causes and wholeheartedly plunge back to restoration of the only Life-Line, i.e the Nature.