Nazi Germany’s Holocaust killed around 6 million Jews over a period of 6 years. In the past 6 years, as per calculations derived from annual estimates, over 6 million people have died in India as a result of Air Pollution.¹ This is, in no manner, meant to undermine the savagely barbaric nature of the Holocaust; rather the comparison merely attempts to put the human cost of air pollution into perspective.
Each year in the Delhi NCR, schools are closed down, offices run at low capacity, traffic control measures are put into place — all owing to the air pollution that engulfs the region and the situation never seems anything less than a severe public health emergency. COVID-19 has taken 5.1 million lives worldwide and around 0.5 million in India, yet the air pollution crisis that has taken — as already mentioned — over 6 million lives in the past 6 years in India alone, has never been given an ‘emergency’ attention on an equal footing. Again, this is not meant to undermine the seriousness of the pandemic: it is just meant to put the magnitude of the crisis into perspective.