Air pollution expert S N Tripathi is Explained.Live guest today

An increase in the network of measuring devices revealed that Delhi was not the only place with polluted air. Most other cities, particularly in the Gangetic plains, had equally bad air quality.

Prof Sachchida Nand Tripathi, Dean of Kotak School of Sustainability at IIT Kanpur.

It’s been more than 10 years since Delhi’s poor air quality has been making global headlines. In these ten years, the situation has only worsened. Forced by citizen outrage, the government has been forced to respond. An air quality index, regular monitoring, and a graded response mechanism was put in place.

An increase in the network of measuring devices revealed that Delhi was not the only place with polluted air. Most other cities, particularly in the Gangetic plains, had equally bad air quality. In fact, India has the maximum number of towns and cities in any list of world’s worst polluted cities. Besides collecting data, there is little that the government has achieved in its effort to deal with the problem of air pollution, despite already spending thousands of crores of rupees. The situation in 2025 is not even marginally better than what it was 10 years earlier.

Unlike climate change, air pollution is not an unmanageable problem. Other countries faced with similar issues in the past, most notably China, have been able to deal with it effectively in much shorter time frames. So, why is India unable to tackle this? Why can’t even the expected spikes in the winter season every year be avoided? We have ample data on sources of air pollution, their locations, timings and other patterns. So why haven’t the mitigation measures made any impact?

The Indian Express will pose these questions, and more, to Prof Sachchida Nand Tripathi, Dean of Kotak School of Sustainability at IIT Kanpur, and one of the leading experts on air pollution in India, at the Explained.Live event Monday. Tripathi and his team have been behind some of the most comprehensive data collection and analysis exercises. He had been advising the government on ways to manage the problem. In particular, The Indian Express will seek to understand whether it is possible to take short-term mitigation measures, by a government committed to act, that can show a visible improvement within a year.

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air pollution