NEW DELHI: Around 40 per cent of India's districts have no government-operated air quality monitoring station, leaving millions without reliable, real-time information on the air they breathe, a study released on Tuesday said.
The analysis, 'Air Quality Data Accessibility in India: Distribution, Gaps, and Network Correlations', was released by Airvoice, a global company which develops solutions for monitoring and managing air quality.
To carry out the study, the authors of the report analysed the spread and performance of India's three main monitoring systems: the manual National Air Monitoring Programme (NAMP), the Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring (CAAQM) network, and the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR) using official datasets up to 2025.
The analysis found that while urban hubs, such as, Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, have dense monitoring coverage, many medium-sized cities and large districts with populations in the millions have only one or two stations or none at all.
Several highly populated districts -- including from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh -- remain either poorly monitored or completely outside the real-time monitoring network.
"Even where stations exist, reliability is an issue. Only about half of continuous monitoring stations provide consistently stable data, while a significant minority suffer from long outages, frequent interruptions or incomplete reporting, limiting their usefulness for public health alerts and policy action," the study said.
Another key finding is that monitoring stations are not always located where pollution is the worst.
At the state and district level, the correlation between PM2.5 pollution levels and the number of monitoring stations remains only moderate.
This means that some highly polluted areas still lack adequate real-time coverage, while some less polluted regions are better monitored.
In a statement, Vitalii Matiunin, CEO of Airvoice, said, "We see a critical gap: automated monitoring remains unavailable in several states, and even where infrastructure exists, significant data is lost due to technical downtime.
While expanding the network remains important, we must now equally focus on ensuring data stability and developing actionable services.