Who publishes this
This site is published by Mr. Ajay Maken, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha. It is not a neutral third party, and it does not pretend to be one. It is the work of a serving opposition politician who believes the air in Delhi is a public health emergency that has outlasted several governments, including ones his own party led.
We state that plainly at the top of every page for a simple reason. The easiest way to dismiss inconvenient data is to question who is behind it. There is nothing here to discover: the ownership is on the masthead, the method is published in full, the source data is the government's own, and every report can be checked line by line.
Delhi's air has been forced to improve once before. Between 1998 and 2002 the Supreme Court required the city's entire fleet of buses, taxis and autorickshaws to move off diesel and on to compressed natural gas. In April 2001 the court was still pressing those orders, against resistance that ran through the transporters, the oil industry and government alike.
Ajay Maken took charge of the transport department in December 2001, and its stance changed. In April 2002, when the bus operators refused to pay a fine the court had imposed, he set out where the department stood:
“We are not blind. We are concerned about the health of citizens and there is no doubt that CNG is cleaner than diesel. We want to end this controversy once and for all by implementing the order and phasing out diesel buses…” Ajay Maken, Transport Minister of Delhi, April 2002, as recorded in the Centre for Science and Environment, The Leapfrog Factor, 2006, page 32
The last diesel bus left Delhi's fleet on 1 December 2002. The air improved. This site exists because the improvement did not hold.
हवा का हिसाब means the reckoning, or the accounting, of the air. That is what this is: a daily account, kept in numbers, of what Delhi and the wider region are actually breathing, and whether anything anyone is doing about it is working.
The name is deliberately not tied to one city. Air pollution does not stop at a municipal boundary. What Delhi breathes is shaped by stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, by brick kilns across the region, and by transport and industry throughout the National Capital Region. An honest account has to follow the air, not the map.
This site rests on the work of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). CREA compiles the raw hourly readings from the CPCB and DPCC monitoring stations into a single clean record, and that record is the base every figure published here is computed from.
Our thanks go further than the data. CREA's research and its steady publishing have done a great deal to create public awareness of what people are breathing, in Delhi and across India, and to keep the subject in front of the people who can act on it. We are glad to acknowledge that debt on every page of this site.
Every report here is free to quote, cite, and republish, with attribution. Journalists, researchers, students, and citizens are all welcome to use it. If you find an error, we want to know: corrections are published rather than quietly made.
The RSS feed carries every new report.
Write to ajaymaken@mycleanair.in. Corrections, data queries, and requests from journalists, researchers and students all reach the same address.