Topics Covered: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.
‘Pandemic generation’ hit hard: CSE:
Context:
State of Environment Report, 2021 was recently released by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).
Highlights:
Impact by Covid 19:
- Biggest Concern: India is all set to usher in a “pandemic generation”, with 375 million children (from newborns to 14-year-olds) likely to suffer long-lasting impacts.
- The challenges could range from being underweight, stunting and increased child mortality, to losses in education and work productivity.
- Over 500 million children have been forced out of school globally and India accounts for more than half of them.
- 115 million additional people might get pushed into extreme poverty by the pandemic — and most of them live in South Asia.
- India ranked 117 among 192 nations in terms of sustainable development and was now behind all South Asian nations, except Pakistan.
State of environment:
- India’s air, water and land have become more polluted between 2009 and 2018.
- Of 88 major industrial clusters in the country, 35 showed overall environmental degradation, 33 pointed to worsening air quality, 45 had more polluted water and in 17, land pollution became worse.
- Tarapur in Maharashtra emerged as the most polluted cluster.
- This data clearly indicated a lack of action over the years to control and reduce pollution even in areas that were already identified as critically or severely polluted.
Performance of various states:
When ranked on the basis of achieving Sustainable Development Goals:
- The best performing States were Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
- The worst performers were Bihar, Jharkhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Uttar Pradesh.
InstaLinks:
Have a brief overview of the key findings.
Sources: the Hindu.