The Sensex is soaring to new highs, but there’s a new high India may soon touch and there’s nothing healthy about it.
The Sensex is soaring to new highs, but there’s a new high India may soon touch and there’s nothing healthy about it.
Over the next decade, India’s burgeoning consumer class is headed for an onslaught of chronic diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and HIV/AIDS due to lifestyle patterns, environmental causes and pollution.
As more Indians reach or exceed an income level roughly equivalent to the official poverty line in Western Europe, the nation’s consumer class has adopted consumption patterns and lifestyles similar to their counterparts in the industrial world. As a result, we’ve even imported their diseases, according to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute.
Rapidly developing economies like India are now struggling with the twin challenges of struggling to feed their populations while also dealing with the growing epidemic of obesity.
Worldwatch Institute also quoted a report of the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers that predicted that the proportion of deaths nationwide from long-term maladies will skyrocket from 53% in 2005 to nearly 67% by 2020. Diets high in fats and sugars and a lack of exercise-two lifestyle trends that increasingly afflict people in developing countries-are major factors behind the rise in certain chronic diseases.
At 30 million, India is now home to the largest population of diabetics in the world, and that number is expected to bloat to 57 million by 2025.
“As food choices change in the developing world, educating consumers about the potential risks of fast food and other sugar-rich, high-fat foods is more important than ever,” notes Danielle Nierenberg, a food and agriculture specialist at Worldwatch.
Industrial activity has also produced a slew of health hazards. Pesticides and fertilisers in agricultural products could cause allergic respiratory diseases, asthma and other chronic ailments. Seminal work by researchers at Banaras Hindu University shows that cancer of the gall bladder along the river Ganga in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is associated with heavy metals like cadmium and chromium. These enter the food and water through untreated sewage and industrial effluents.
Increasing prosperity has also invited lifestyle-related diseases (LRDs) ranging from obesity and attention disorders to disabling conditions like diabetes, angina and osteoporosis. The incidence of LRDs is growing rapidly in rich pockets of large cities like Delhi and Mumbai.
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