How do you read Delhi's live air data yourself?

This site deliberately shows no live numbers. The official ones are free, updated hourly, and more useful once you know which station to look at and which average you are reading.

Where are Delhi's official air quality numbers published?

CPCB's National Air Quality Index portal lets you choose a state, city and station and see its AQI, category, the pollutants behind it and their recent trend; it also ranks and compares cities.¹

Sameer is CPCB's app for the same data: hourly AQI updates, location-based readings, city and station search, and a section for filing complaints with photos.²

The daily bulletin is the single number reported in the news: one value per city, released around 4 pm, averaging the past 24 hours.³ The archive goes back to 2015 and is what this site's year calendar is built from.⁴⁵

DPCC's real-time portal shows ambient air data from the Delhi Pollution Control Committee's own stations, location by location.⁶

SAFAR, the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research, is run by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. Its site shows AQI for Delhi and a few other cities, with health guidance.⁷

Who runs Delhi's monitoring stations?

More than one agency. In 2024 Delhi's daily bulletin drew on 40 continuous stations.⁴ A Newslaundry investigation counted the continuous stations installed between 2010 and 2018 and found that most were run by DPCC, with others run by the India Meteorological Department and CPCB, and it reported that many breached CPCB's siting guidelines, for example by sitting close to trees or roads.⁸ The portal shows all of them side by side.

How do you pick the station that matters to you?

1. Find your nearest station on the CPCB portal or in Sameer. Nearest by distance is a start, not the end.
2. Check what surrounds it. A station beside an arterial road or an industrial area may read very differently from a quiet residential lane a kilometre away. If your own street is more like a different station's setting, watch that one too.
3. Look at two or three stations together. If they agree, the reading is probably representative of your area. If one stands apart, treat it with caution.
4. Check that it is reporting. Stations go offline. The bulletin lists how many stations participated each day; in 2024 that ranged from 26 to 40.⁴

Which average are you looking at?

Most confusion about “today's AQI” is confusion about time. The bulletin is a 24-hour average.³ A station's latest hourly reading can be much higher at 7 am under a winter inversion and much lower in the afternoon, when the air mixes; Delhi's winter mixed layer is far shallower at night than by day.⁹ Ozone and carbon monoxide use 8-hour averages in the index formula.¹⁰ For a decision about the next hour, such as whether to open a window or go for a walk, the hourly trend at a nearby station is more useful than the bulletin's single number.

Which scale is it?

If a number looks surprising, check the category names before anything else. India's index uses Satisfactory, Moderate, Poor, Very Poor and Severe; the US scale uses names like Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups and Hazardous.³¹¹ The chapter How do you read India's AQI? works through a conversion.