Does Stringency of Lockdown Affect Air Quality? Evidence from Indian Cities
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Does Stringency of Lockdown Affect Air Quality? Evidence from Indian Cities Surender Kumar 1
& Shunsuke Managi
2
Received: 26 July 2020 / Accepted: 6 August 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
The precipitous spread of COVID-19 has created a conflict between human health and economic well-being. To contain the spread of its contagious effect, India imposed a stringent lockdown, and then the stringency was relaxed to some extent in its succeeding phases. We measure social benefits of the lockdown in terms of improved air quality in Indian cities by quantifying the effects with city-specific slope coefficients. We find that the containment measures have resulted in improvement in air quality, but it is not uniform across cities and across pollutants. The level of PM2.5 decreases from about 6 to 25% in many cities. Moreover, we observe that partial relaxations do not help in resuming economic and social activities. It should also be noted that counter-virus measures could not bring levels of the emissions to WHO standards; it highlights the importance of role of green production and consumption activities. Keywords COVID-19 . Lockdown . Air pollution . India . City JEL Classification Q53 . Q52 . I18 . I15
Introduction The rapid spread of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has created a public health problem globally by human mobility (Nakamura and Managi 2020). Spotted in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, the virus has infected almost every country around the globe since then. The contagion has
* Surender Kumar [email protected] Shunsuke Managi [email protected]
1
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi 110007, India
2
Urban Institute & Departments of Civil Engineering, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Nishi-ku, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan
Economics of Disasters and Climate Change
created a conflict between human-health and economic well-being. Governments have to resort to unprecedented non-pharmaceutical interventions such as complete lockdown of cities, among others, to contain the spread of the virus. India went for complete lockdown of the whole country (Yoo and Managi 2020). While there are enormous social and economic costs of enforcing these measures (Purcel 2020), there could be some unintentional social benefits in terms of improved environmental quality. About 900 deaths are linked to hardships of containment measures imposed during the lockdown in India.1 Increased incidences of mortality and morbidity are associated with decreasing air quality (Brauer 2010). Globally, 4.6 million deaths annually could be attributed to illness and diseases related to air pollution (Cohen et al. 2017). Indian cities seriously suffer from air pollution; they are among the worst polluted cities in the world. About 1.25 million deaths are attributed to air pollution in 2017 in the country (Balakrishnan et al. 2019). 114,700 deaths from the five causes (IHD, Stroke, COPD, LRI, and LNC) could be attributed to PM2.5 exposure in 29 million-plus Indian cities
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