Dirty cooking fuels pose major threat to infants in India

BATHINDA: Twenty-seven of every 1,000 babies and children die due to exposure to dirty cooking fuels in India, where air pollution is among the worst in the world, says the new Cornell research.
As per the sixth annual World Air Quality Report, released in 2023, of the top 100 cities with the worst air pollution, 83 are in India. All of them had levels of pollution 10 times higher than the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines.
And while outdoor air pollution gets much attention, the Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations suggest poor indoor air quality is much deadlier because it is where most people spend most of their time.
“This is the first paper out there that gives a robust causal estimate of the true cost of using these biomass fuels for households, in terms of the young lives lost,” said Arnab Basu, professor in the Charles H Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and author of ‘Cooking Fuel Choice and Child Mortality in India’, which published recently in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
“We use nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey data from over 25 years – this is a comprehensive dataset and we were able to identify all kinds of polluting fuels used by households,” Basu said.
The researchers used large-scale household survey data from 1992 to 2016 to determine the human cost of reliance on dirty cooking fuels and found that the largest effect was shown in infants under a month old. That is an age group where lungs are not fully developed and when infants are most closely stuck to their mothers, who are often the primary home cooks, said Basu.
The mortality effect is much higher for young girls than boys in Indian households. This is not because girls are more fragile or susceptible to pollution-related respiratory illnesses, but rather that in India there is a strong son preference and families may be less likely to seek treatment when a young daughter falls ill or begins to cough, he said.
“A switch to cleaner fuels would not only have a positive impact on overall childhood health, but would also address this neglect of daughters,” Basu said.
According to the WHO, about a third of the world’s population cooks food over an open fire or in stoves fueled by biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) – contributing to an estimated 3.2 million deaths per year worldwide.
“A lot of focus is on outdoor air pollution and how crop waste is burned. Governments can make laws against crop burning and can give farmers payments in advance to incentivize them not to burn”, Basu said.
The paper suggests looking at indoor pollution is equally important, with an understanding that regional agricultural land ownership and forest cover, household characteristics and family structure, among other factors, play a role.