Congress leader and former Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh on Thursday accused the Narendra Modi government of fuelling India’s public health crisis linked to air pollution through inadequate actions, delays and underfunding.

Ramesh said the clean air targets set under the Modi government are “much too low to save lives”, citing new research that has found evidence for air pollution-attributed premature deaths at pollutant concentrations even below India’s adopted safe limit.

Ramesh was the environment minister between May 2009 and July 2011 during the second tenure of the Manmohan Singh government.

The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) launched in 2019 has “turned out to be a complete failure”, Ramesh said in a statement flagging concerns that the scheme is underfunded and many of the 131 cities covered by it lack the appropriate infrastructure to track their air pollution.

Among 46 cities with data, only eight have met the NCAP’s low target and 22 cities have seen their air pollution levels grow worse, Ramesh said in the statement, a day after scientists released a study estimating air pollution-attributed deaths in 10 Indian cities.

The study by researchers in India, Sweden and the US has estimated 33,000 premature deaths attributed to air pollution each year in 10 cities — around 12,000 in Delhi, followed by 5,100 in Mumbai, and 4,700 in Calcutta.

Ramesh has said this public health crisis is “the direct result” of the failures of the Modi government that, he said, “has prioritised profits of the Prime Minister’s friends over the health of India’s people”.

Ramesh said the Modi government since 2017 has “continuously pushed back the deadline” for coal power plants to install pollution-controlling devices called flue gas desulfurisation equipment. This, Ramesh said, has “led to thousands of (air pollution-attributed) deaths, all for the profit of plant owners”.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, and collaborators had last year described the expansion of air pollution monitoring infrastructure across the NCAP cities as a “top priority” after their study found only 1,321 monitoring stations in contrast to the recommended 4,097.

Ramesh, in his statement, has called for what he has described as a drastic increase in funds for the NCAP. The current budget, inclusive of the NCAP funds and grants from the finance commission, is about ₹10,500 crore, spread across the 131 cities.

“Our cities need at least 10 to 20 times more funding — (the) NCAPO must be made a ₹25,000 crore programme,” Ramesh said. Air pollution norms for coal power plants must be “enforced immediately”, with all coal power plants directed to install the flue gas desulfurisation equipment by the end of 2024, he said.

The 10-city study released on Wednesday has suggested that air pollution is causing premature deaths even at concentrations of tiny particulate matter sized 2.5 microns (PM2.5) below India’s safe limit of 40 microgrammes per cubic metre. This value is more than double the World Health Organisation’s recommended limit of 15 microgrammes per cubic metre of PM2.5.