About DailyAQI

DailyAQI is a free, independent air-quality reference for India and, increasingly, the wider world. Our aim is simple: to answer the question people actually ask — "is the air safe right now, and what should I do about it?" — quickly, honestly and in plain language. This page explains what we do, where our data comes from, and the principles that shape every number and word on the site.

Our mission

Air pollution is invisible, technical and easy to ignore, yet it affects health every single day. We built DailyAQI to close the gap between complex monitoring data and the ordinary decisions it should inform: whether to go for a run, whether to send the children out to play, whether to wear a mask or run a purifier. That means taking the raw output of government monitoring networks and turning it into something a person can read in seconds and trust — without a science degree, a subscription or a wall of jargon.

What DailyAQI offers

The site brings together live and reference information in one place:

Live AQI for hundreds of Indian cities, updated hourly, each with a pollutant breakdown and a plain-language "is it safe to go outside?" answer.
A live air-quality map and city rankings that show the most and least polluted places right now.
Tools to compare two cities, find the AQI near you, and track trends over time.
Reference guides on the pollutants, masks, purifiers, health effects and how the index works.
Free widgets and an open data feed so other sites can share the same trustworthy information.

Where our data comes from

For India, our readings come from the Central Pollution Control Board's continuous monitoring network, published through the Government of India's open-data portal under the Government Open Data License – India. For cities outside India, we use public monitoring stations aggregated by OpenAQ. We compute the Air Quality Index ourselves from the raw pollutant concentrations, using the official CPCB method for India and the US EPA method internationally. The full details are on our methodology page, which explains exactly how a station reading becomes the number you see.

What makes us different

There are other places to check air quality, so we hold ourselves to a few things that matter.

Honest data. We never invent, estimate or back-fill a reading. If a city has no fresh data, its page says "data updating" rather than showing a stale or guessed number.
Transparency. We show timestamps, station counts and live network coverage, so you can judge how current and well-supported any reading is.
The right scale. Indian cities are shown on the CPCB scale they are actually measured against, not a foreign scale that would mislabel them.
Genuinely useful design. Fast pages, clear colours, and answers written for people, not specialists.

From a number to a decision

The whole design of DailyAQI is organised around one idea: a reading is only useful if it changes what you do. That is why every city page does not stop at a number but answers, in plain words, whether it is safe to be outside, and why the site is full of tools — a live map for the regional picture, comparisons for context, near-me for your own location, trends for the pattern over time. Each of these exists to shorten the distance between "the AQI is 240" and "so I will move the run indoors and put a mask in my bag." We treat the index as the start of a decision, not the end of a lookup, and we write everything — from the health notes to the guides — with that next step in mind.

This decision-first philosophy also shapes what we choose not to do. We avoid alarmism, because panic is not a plan; we avoid jargon, because a number you cannot interpret is useless; and we avoid false precision, because a confident-looking figure you cannot trust is worse than an honest gap. The goal throughout is a reader who closes the page knowing what the air is doing and what, if anything, to do about it.

Who DailyAQI is for

The site is built for anyone who breathes and wants to make a better decision: a parent deciding about outdoor play, a runner planning a morning route, someone with asthma weighing whether to carry a mask, a teacher scheduling sports, or simply a resident who wants to understand the air in their city. It is equally useful to journalists, researchers and developers, who can draw on our open data and embeddable widgets to bring live air quality to their own audiences.

Accuracy, independence and honesty

DailyAQI is an independent information service. We are not affiliated with the CPCB, OpenAQ, the US EPA or any government body, and we do not accept payment to alter or suppress readings. Our health guidance follows published CPCB and US EPA category descriptions and widely accepted references such as WHO guidelines, and it is always general information rather than medical advice — for a specific condition, a professional and official advisories should come first. When we get something wrong, we want to fix it: our approach to sourcing, corrections and independence is set out in our editorial standards, and the live health of our monitoring coverage is shown on the data-health page.

How we cover India — and beyond

DailyAQI is India-first by design, because that is where the need and the data density are greatest, and where using the correct national scale matters most. We track hundreds of Indian cities on the CPCB scale, add locality-level detail for larger cities where multiple stations exist, and organise everything so you can move from a national overview down to your own neighbourhood. Beyond India, we cover major world cities on the US EPA scale using public data, so the site is useful for travel and global perspective as well as daily life at home. Coverage grows as monitoring networks expand and new cities appear in the feeds.

The role of technology and automation

Keeping hundreds of cities current, hour after hour, is only possible with automation, and we are candid about how we use it. Software fetches official data, validates it, computes the AQI with the published methods, and refreshes the pages on a schedule; this is what lets a small independent service stay live and accurate. What automation does not do is invent facts. The numbers are computed from real measurements, not generated, and where we present reference or explanatory content it is written to be factual and free of fabricated statistics. Technology is the engine that keeps the data fresh; honesty is the rule that governs what we publish.

Why trust matters more than reach

It would be easy to show more cities by filling gaps with estimates, or to make the site look more authoritative with invented figures. We deliberately do neither, because an air-quality service is only worth anything if you can trust the number when it matters — on the morning you are deciding whether your child should play outside. That is why we would rather show "data updating" than a guess, why we document our method openly, and why we keep our health guidance general and defer to official advisories. Reach is worthless without reliability, and reliability is the whole point.

How you can get involved

Accuracy improves when readers help. If you spot an error — a mislabelled city, a wrong coordinate, an implausible reading — tell us and we will investigate and correct it. If you run a website, you are welcome to embed our free widgets or use our open data to share live air quality with your own community, with a simple link back. The more people who can see, understand and act on the air around them, the better.

Key takeaways

DailyAQI is a free, independent air-quality reference that turns official monitoring data into plain-language answers.
Data comes from CPCB (India) and OpenAQ (world); we compute the AQI with the official methods.
We never fabricate readings, we show our sources and coverage, and we use the correct scale for each country.
The site serves residents, parents, runners, journalists, researchers and developers alike.
We are not affiliated with any government body, we offer no medical advice, and we correct errors when found.