Assessment of Indoor Air Quality at Various Socio-Economic Zones

Air Pollution from both indoor and outdoor origin contributes significantly to human exposure and is a cause of concern to citizens living in urban as well as in rural India. Today, our lifestyle demands a considerable amount of time to be spent within the indoor environment making quantification, variability and health impact assessment of indoor pollutants a necessity. Till now, sparse information is available on indoor air quality (IAQ) with no guidelines and permissible limits for the residential area of developing populous country like India. Our study tries to bridge the gap by generating onsite primary data by monitoring conventional air pollutants like PM2.5, SPM, NO2 and SO2, at diverse residential setup differentiated on the basis of three socio-economic zones, i.e., lower- , middle- and higher-income class. The result captivatingly showed that high-income class despite having all the modern conveniences was found to be poorer in terms of IAQ, trailed by low-income group; however, middle economic class was found to be better. Interestingly this study also pointed out that ventilation (or air exchange) plays a critical role in improving IAQ which was substantiated with the calculation of indoor/outdoor (I/O) ratios. Ratios clearly depicted better indoor air quality of middle-income group (EZ II) in comparison to high (EZ III) and low-income group (EZ I).