A binding national plan is urgently needed to tackle air pollution

The National Capital Region attracts countrywide and global attention for its poor air quality almost all the year round. But a recent study by Climate Trends, a research consultancy, offers a sobering truth. No major Indian city has achieved a safe air-quality index (AQI) in the past decade. The study covers 11 major cities over 10 years (2015-November 20, 2025). It shows that even for those cities such as Bengaluru, which had the cleanest air quality, their AQI never hit the “good” category; it has consistently stayed in the “satisfactory” category. 

The key message from this 10-year study is that despite policy intervention and technological improvement, India’s major cities continue to suffer major air-quality challenges. Mumbai, the financial capital, and Chennai, an emerging industrial hub, are illustrative of the problem. Both have seen their air quality improve from “moderate” to “satisfactory”. Mumbai saw its AQI improve from a high of 120 in 2022 to 83.2 in 2025. Chennai touched a high of 115 in 2016 to 74.67 in 2025. It is worth noting, however, that these numbers represent annual averages rather than median rates. There have been months when Mumbai’s air quality has rivalled Delhi’s in its inferiority. Unlike the drier plains of the north, where pollutant-dispersing winds subside in the winter, both cities also have the benefit of a long, heavy rainy season as well as year-round sea breezes to leaven air pollution. In other words, given their natural bounties, their air-quality indices should consistently be in the “good” category. In Delhi, where the air quality has stayed in the “poor” category with many perilous days of “severe” and “hazardous”, the sharp diminution of farm fires, often cited as a key reason for winter pollution, also suggests that a different paradigm is needed. The need for a more structured national-level pollution plan is becoming more urgent by the day. 

To be sure, the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), set up in 2019 by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, aimed to do just this. It targeted 131 cities in 24 states and Union Territories to achieve reductions of up to 40 per cent for particulate matter (PM) 10 concentrations. The NCAP’s founding conception — of engaging all stakeholders and providing funds for cities to develop specific action plans — has yielded some positive results but the larger outcomes have been mixed and mostly suboptimal. This uneven performance has largely been the result of the absence of a legal mandate linking funding to performance. As a result, efficient states made some progress whereas inefficient ones performed poorly. The absence of state capacity in the form of the availability of trained technical expertise and integrated data standards has also hampered the programme. 

Perhaps the exclusive focus on PM10 in the performance-assessment framework instead of including PM2.5, which, health experts say, has more harmful impacts, has also detracted from the NCAP’s impact. The findings of the study by Climate Trends offer scope for a reframing of policy. A national air-quality programme should be all-inclusive in nature and outcomes framed in terms of specific mandates – such as promoting electric-vehicle infrastructure to reduce vehicular emission, augmenting public transport solutions, and, most importantly, educating the public to participate in a programme to avert a serious public-health crisis down the line.