India NCAP – Air Quality Index (AQI) in Indian Cities 2015-2023

Updated: March, 2024

The table below presents a summary of AQI Daily bulletins released by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) since 2015. The CSV file contains (available) day-wise city-average AQI value, AQI category, and conditional pollutant information and the image is a calendar plot of the AQI values, along with the average number of stations reporting AQI value in each year. Click on the image to access the full working paper.

• AQI methodology was notified in 2014
• Number of unique cities in the 2015 bulletins = 22
• Number of unique cities in the 2023 bulletins = 271
• CPCB AQI Daily Bulletins archive as PDFs (last accessed March 27, 2024)
• A calculator designed to use monitoring or modeling data to estimate either real time or archived or forecasted AQI — [Link] to download the code, instructions, and videos.
• Code for parsing PDFs and archiving the data is on [github]
• Working papers (click here for PDFs)
  • Series #46-2021: 10 Frequently asked questions on air quality index (AQI)
  • Series #47-2024: Air Quality Index Analysis for Indian Cities 2015-2023
  • Series #48-2024: Data from small monitoring networks is unreliable: Case of Indian cities
  • Series #49-2024: How to spot anomalies in data trends: Evaluating AQI data from Indian cities
• Media posts
  • Are we going to be dogmatic about large sample sizes? (Medium)
  • Can’t control what you can’t measure: Why India is losing to air pollution (India Today)
• Posters
  • IGAC 2024 – Uncertainty of Operating Smaller Number of Ambient Monitoring Stations: Indian Cities from 2015 to 2023 (download)
  • Presentation at IndiaFOSS 2025

Back to NCAP data repository.

Use the search window (on top-right of the table) to select specific city or state (for example: Assam)

Daily Air Quality Index (AQI) Data for Indian Cities 2015-2023