India's Air Pollution Watch Has Blind Spots: Inactive Monitoring Stations

As Delhi's air quality plunges back into the "very poor" category with an AQI crossing 300, serious questions are emerging over India's capacity to accurately monitor the deepening crisis.On November 12, a significant share of the country's air-quality monitoring stations were not functioning, according to data from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). According to the station-status dataset reviewed at 1 pm, 634 monitoring stations were listed, of which 365 were active, 257 inactive and 12 marked as delayed.

This means that about 40.5 per cent of the stations were inactive, while another 1.9 per cent were reporting delayed data.The figures highlight a potential gap in India's air-quality monitoring network at a time when pollution remains a major public-health concern across several regions.India's population is estimated at around 147.7 crore in 2026. As of March 2026, the country had 1,646 manual and continuous air-quality monitoring stations spread across 603 cities.