Delhi’s official air quality figure was 350 on Tuesday, in the ‘very poor’ band and the city’s worst since January 20. At 6pm, 11 of Delhi’s 57 reporting stations were in the ‘severe’ band, with Jahangirpuri highest at 459 and Lodhi Road lowest at 212. The air at Safdarjung had been calm for most of Monday night, and Nasa’s satellite had counted 167 farm fires in Punjab and Haryana that day, a count well short of the real number.
Available on the HT app and the website — just type hindustantimes.com/breathe — the new dashboard gives residents of Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR) the government’s own air quality figures, updated every hour, labelled with who measured it and when; juxtaposed with wind speed, wind direction, farm fires, and the mixing height above ground level where the toxins have settled. HT has brought all of these together on one screen in its new HT Pollution Dashboard.
HT has reported on Delhi’s air this way all season, setting the government’s pollution figures beside the weather, the fires and the years before. Phone apps can show different numbers for the same hour, from different sensors and on different scales. HT uses only data from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and Nasa. The government goes by CPCB’s figures when it halts construction or takes vehicles off the road, and HT’s newsroom checks them. The dashboard now does this for every reader, every hour, on one screen. Three agencies publish the figures it brings together, in a dozen places, and no other site sets them side by side.
