184 AQI at Pusa, the worst monitor in Delhi today, Moderate on the Central Pollution Control Board's own scale, and ozone set that figure. 12.3 lakh people live within 4 km of it.

The destruction of Delhi's air

Forty-seven years of evidence, 1980 to July 2026

Delhi has never once met India's own annual standard for clean air, in any of the forty-seven years this record covers. On the government's own monitors the city breathed 104 micrograms in 2024, which is about 21 times the World Health Organization's guideline, and the winter that ended in 2026 averaged 200. Delhi had no working network of monitors until the 2010s, so the years in which its air was ruined were never measured at the time, and this report reconstructs them.

Annual mean PM2.5 across North India, one panel per period, with Delhi outlined in each. Every panel is a level inside a single period, so none contains a comparison and none crosses the instrument change of 2000. The last panel is Delhi's own monitors, measured, and the fifth restates the four levels as multiples of the WHO guideline.