In India, deaths caused by air pollution are nearing unprecedented levels, putting the country on par with China, where air is the world's deadliest, a report says.
The joint report, published on Tuesday by two US-based health research institutes, said that nearly 1.1 million people apparently die each year as a result of exposure to India's polluted air.
The report, compiled by the Health Effects Institute and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, warned that India could even outpace China in terms of premature deaths linked to PM2.5, a microscopic particle that floats on air and lodges deep in the lungs to cause lung cancer, chronic bronchitis and heart disease.
"India now approaches China in the number of deaths attributable to PM2.5," said the report, adding that deaths linked to air pollution in China had steadied in recent years.
India has recorded a nearly 50-percent increase in early deaths linked to PM2.5.
The report said China had managed to maintain early deaths from PM2.5 at about 1.1 million since 2005, whereas in India, the number had steadily climbed from an estimated 737,400 premature deaths a year in 1990 to 1.09 million in 2015.
It said that India and neighboring Bangladesh currently have the highest PM2.5 concentrations in the world, adding that China and India accounted for more than half of all global deaths related to PM2.5 exposure.
Pollution has skyrocketed in India, a country of more than a billion people that has undergone a rapid economic transformation in the past two decades, which has been mainly due to India's increasing reliance on burning coal for energy and torching farmland to plant new crops.
