India and the rest of the South Asian region are covered by a deadly, three-km deep blanket of pollution, which is radically changing monsoon patterns, causing drought, reducing India’s winter rice harvest. This is literally killing hundreds of thousands of people by respiratory disease, as revealed by data from seven Indian cities, including Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai.

The report on the ‘Asian Brown Haze’, released by scientists working with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said that the vast “pollution parcel” could endanger the economic success of South Asian countries, particularly India.

The haze has been identified as a deadly cocktail of ash, acids, aerosols and other particles by 200 scientists, including A. P. Mitra, National Phyiscal Laboratory, V. Ramanathan, Scripps Institute of Oceanography in the United States and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.

The scientists, who believe the worst may be yet to come for the stricken area, said the effects of the haze would intensify over the next 30 years, as South Asia’s population rises to an estimated five billion people.

The report said the Indian data suggested some kind of air pollution was responsible for 24,000 annual premature deaths in the early 1990s. Just a few years later, the number of premature deaths had increased to an estimated 37,000 per year.

Underlining the importance of the new study, UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer warned that India is expecting more than two million people to die because of the incomplete burning of biomass or the open fires used by the majority of ordinary Indians to cook their food.

Toepfer stressed that the Asian haze was largely the result of forest fires, the burning of agricultural wastes, dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations and emissions from millions of inefficient cookers burning wood, cow dung and other ‘bio fuels’.

Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth have been calling for India and other affected countries to be helped to popularise solar cookers among the poor.

The UNEP says Project Asian Brown Cloud should establish observatories to study the haze as well as its impact on agricultural, health and water budget.