India’s Air Quality Reality: 27 Years in One Graph

This heatmap tells a sobering story about PM2.5 compliance across 5,968 Indian subdistricts from 1998-2024.

Three striking patterns emerge:

• Seasonal lifeline: Monsoon months (June-September) consistently show ~70 to close to 100% compliance with national standard of 40 micrograms per cubic meter. Rain helps clear the air.
• Winter crisis: October-April sees compliance collapse—often below 50%. In many recent winters, only 20-30% of subdistricts meet national standards.
• The WHO gap: Over 27 years, WHO compliance barely scratches 4% (at max a handful of subdistricts). In most months across all 27 years, it's effectively zero. We're not even close.

The uncomfortable truth? Even India's "lenient" 40 µg/m³ standard (8x stricter than WHO) remains out of reach for most of the country for half the year.

Behind each percentage are millions breathing toxic air—not occasionally, but systematically, season after season, year after year.

The data doesn't lie. The question is: what will we do about it?

--------------------------------

Access the full underlying data and explore my latest #biteSizedAQ (github.com/AarshBatra/biteSizedAQ) project: Links here and also in the sources section:

• Link to original project under the #biteSizedAQ repo which processes the underlying subdistrict level satellite derived PM2.5 data used in this plot repo (contains data + pipeline): https://github.com/AarshBatra/biteSizedAQ/tree/main/22.ind.block.mth.pm2.5.sat.data.processing.1998.2024

• Link to the repo that contains the raw and final data and scripts for specifically reproducing the above map: https://github.com/AarshBatra/visual.capitalist.articles/tree/main/9.ind.subdist.aq.mth.compl.1998.2024