India’s electricity demand nearly quadrupled between 2000 and 2020, from about 450 TWh to almost 2,000 TWh, and coal supplied about 76 per cent of it. A new study in Nature Cities, by Basudev Swain of the University of Oxford and colleagues, has now counted what that cost in human lives.
Urban deaths attributable to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) rose from about 0.67 million in 2000 to 0.87 million in 2020. Deaths linked to power-sector emissions alone rose from about 15,000 to nearly 3,00,000, an increase of about 1,800 per cent. The toll is heaviest across the Indo-Gangetic Plain and the Horseshoe Belt, where India’s 253 coal plants are concentrated.
The power sector’s share of the haze over our cities went from 16 per cent to 36 per cent.
Clean cooking took the smoke out of the kitchen. Coal put it back into the city sky. And the IEA expects India’s coal demand to rise another 4.2 per cent in 2026.
A government that keeps choosing coal-power profits over the lungs of its people is choosing these deaths.
