5 days ago
Gurgaon now pollution blind as sole reading station goes offline
Gurgaon: The city, one of India's most-polluted urban areas, has been without real-time air quality monitoring for the past 10 days. The lone functional Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Station(CAQMS) in the city, located at Gwalpahari and operated by IMD, last recorded readings on July 13.
Since then, even this station went offline.
What this means is that for over a week now, no government-run air quality monitor in Gurgaon is providing AQI data to the public, state pollution control board and national dashboards like CPCB. This didn't happen overnight.
The Sector 51's station stopped working in April, while Teri's monitor went quiet in March and Vikas Sadan's in Jan.
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What happens when data disappears?
First, regulatory agencies lose visibility.
Without live PM2.5 and PM10 data, there's no way to evaluate day-to-day pollution readings or activate emergency measures like GRAP. Public health advisories can't be issued, and residents with respiratory or cardiac conditions have no information to base their day's planning on. This isn't a minor glitch.
It's a complete data blackout in a city where the air is often dangerously dirty.
"Monitoring and availability of air quality data is the first step to improve air, and it is even more critical for a city like Gurgaon, which sits in one of the most polluted airsheds globally," said Sunil Dahiya, founder and lead analyst at Envirocatalysts.
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"HSPCB, CPCB and IITM must urgently coordinate to resolve tendering delays and restore the system. Pollution control efforts need to be data-driven," he added.
Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) analyst Manoj Kumar said the situation needed urgent attention. "With the peak pollution season just a few months away, transparency and timely warnings for the public are non-negotiable."
IMD's VK Soni, responding to the shutdown of Gwalpahari, said, "Some parameters at the station started showing abnormal values, likely due to the sensor malfunction.
As a precaution, CPCB had asked us to stop data transmission until the issue is completely resolved. We have identified the problem and are working to fix it. The station should be back online shortly."
A study of air quality data by CREA ranked Gurgaon as the fifth most-polluted Indian city in the first half of 2025, with an average concentration of PM2.5 at 75 µg/m³, 15 times higher than WHO's maximum permissible limit (5 µg/m³).
It further identified January 19, 2025, as Gurgaon's 'overshoot day'. By then, particulate matter 2.5 concentration was already so high that, even if levels were to drastically reduce to zero for the rest of the year, the city would still fail to meet WHO's annual limit.
