Ashish Ranjan
According to a report, India performed poorly on the air pollution index in 2022, despite moving up three spots from the previous year on the list of countries with the worst air quality. Chad, Iraq, Pakistan, Bahrain, and Bangladesh were the five most polluted nations in 2022, followed by India in eighth place, a decline of three spots from the previous year. IQAir, a Swiss corporation specialising in air quality technology, issued its annual report on global air quality.
The 5th Annual World Air Quality Report reveals alarming information about 2022’s most polluted nations, territories, and regions. (AP)
According to World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, the annual average PM2.5 level should be 5 g/m3 or less, but India’s annual average PM2.5 level in 2022 was 53.3 g/m3, more than 10 times the safe limit and only marginally lower than the average for 2021. Bhiwadi in Rajasthan was the most polluted city in India, with annual PM2.5 levels of 92.7 g/m3, and 60 percent of Indian cities included in the report had annual PM2.5 levels at least seven times higher than the WHO guideline.
Only six nations – Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, and New Zealand – met the WHO’s safe limit, while 90 percent of the 131 nations and regions analysed exceeded the yearly PM2.5 guideline value.Lahore, Pakistan, was the most polluted metropolitan area in 2022, a massive surge from 15th place in 2021.
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The region of Central and South Asia was home to eight of the world’s ten most polluted cities. India and Pakistan have the poorest air quality in the Central and South Asia region, which includes Bangladesh, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, according to the report. In 2022, only nine communities in the region met WHO standards for annual PM2.5 concentrations.
