The title could have, as well been “What is choking the Indian Skies”. After all, the air in whole of India seems polluted.

To start with, we pulled up a real-time map of air pollution across the world. Here is the view we see on most of the days. It’s not just Delhi, it’s Kolkata, and Mumbai, and Lucknow, and Kanpur, and Varanasi, and Allahabad, and most of the major Indian cities. By many parameters, India has 14 of the Top 20 polluted cities in the world!

Few months back, we started on a “massive” journey to solve the most critical problems facing the Earth. Crisis situations like the one above is a sign of something gone terribly wrong in the way India is progressing. We knew things will not be intuitive, much less easy.

One of the problems we looked at recently, was that of pollution in Delhi’s air. One widely used index to measure air pollution is called the AQI (Air Quality Index). AQI normally has 6 grades, with values ranging from 0 to 300. Anything above 300, is Hazardous. For example, here is the AQI levels in Tokyo, Japan & Delhi, India.

As you can see, most of it is green with AQI of less than 50. And almost all within 70. Apart from the glaring difference in AQI level, there is also a huge difference in number of air quality stations in Tokyo vs those in Delhi. One would think that, extreme levels of pollution ought to have sprung Delhi into action, but we don’t seem to care. The popular adage ‘You can’t solve what you don’t measure’, seems relevant here.