Live Air Quality Map of India

A live air quality map turns thousands of separate pollution measurements into a single picture you can read in a second. Every city with a working government monitor becomes a coloured dot, and the colour tells you — instantly — whether the air there is clean, merely acceptable, or genuinely harmful right now. This guide explains how to read the DailyAQI live map, what the colours and numbers mean, why some places have a dot and others do not, and how to turn what you see into a sensible decision about your day.

What a live air quality map actually shows

The map plots each monitoring city at its real geographic coordinates and colours it by its current Air Quality Index (AQI). The AQI is a single number, from 0 to 500, that compresses the concentrations of several pollutants into one comparable value; the higher the number, the more polluted the air and the greater the health concern. For Indian cities the map uses the national CPCB scale and its six categories, while cities in other countries are shown on the US EPA scale, because the two systems draw their category boundaries differently.

Each dot is a live summary, not a forecast. When you open the page, a small script fetches the latest computed reading for every city and paints the map; there is no averaging over the day and no prediction of what the air will do next. If you want the underlying detail — the pollutant breakdown, the dominant pollutant, the 24-hour and 7-day trend, and a plain-language health note — you click the dot and open that city's full report. The map is the overview; the city page is the deep dive.

Reading the colours: the six-band system

India's AQI is divided into six bands, and the map uses the official colour for each so the picture is intuitive even before you read a single number. Green means Good (0–50) — the air is clean and poses little or no risk. Light green is Satisfactory (51–100) — acceptable for almost everyone, with minor effects possible for unusually sensitive people. Yellow marks Moderate (101–200), where sensitive groups start to notice symptoms. Orange is Poor (201–300), red is Very Poor (301–400), and a deep maroon is Severe (401–500), the level at which even healthy people are affected and outdoor activity should be avoided.

• Green / light green — clean to acceptable; normal activity is fine.
• Yellow — moderate; sensitive groups should pace themselves outdoors.
• Orange / red — poor to very poor; limit outdoor exertion, consider a mask.
• Maroon — severe; stay indoors with filtered air where possible.

Because the colour and the category carry the same message, you can scan a whole region at a glance: a cluster of red and maroon dots is a pollution hotspot, while a run of green along a coastline usually signals cleaner, better-ventilated air.

Why India and the world use different scales

You will notice that an Indian city and a foreign city can show similar pollution yet display different AQI numbers. That is expected. India's National Air Quality Index, defined by the Central Pollution Control Board, and the United States EPA index use different breakpoints to convert pollutant concentrations into the 0–500 scale, and they label the bands differently. The DailyAQI map therefore keeps each country on its own correct scale rather than forcing everything into one system, and it marks which scale a dot uses. When you compare places, compare the category (for example "Poor" versus "Unhealthy") rather than only the raw number.

Why not every town has a dot

Air quality on the map comes from a network of fixed, reference-grade government monitoring stations, not from a model of every street. A city appears only when it has at least one working monitor reporting recent data. That is a deliberate honesty choice: rather than inventing a value for a place we cannot measure, we leave it off the map. If your town is not shown, zoom in and pick the nearest city that is — or use AQI near me, which finds the closest monitoring city to your location and tells you how far away it is so you can judge how representative the reading is.

How often the map updates

Indian readings refresh every hour from the CPCB feed, and world readings refresh from OpenAQ on a similar cadence. A city that has gone quiet — a monitor offline, a feed lagging — is shown as "data updating" rather than frozen on a stale number. This matters on high-pollution days, when air quality can swing sharply within a few hours; a map that pretends yesterday's value is today's does more harm than good. If you are checking before going out, reload the page to pull the latest hour.

Reading regional and seasonal patterns

Once you can read the colours, the map starts to tell a story about geography. The Indo-Gangetic plain across northern India tends to light up first and worst, because it is landlocked and prone to winter temperature inversions that trap emissions from traffic, industry, cooking fuel and seasonal crop-residue burning close to the ground. Coastal and southern cities usually stay greener for longer, helped by sea breezes that disperse pollutants. The contrast is sharpest in winter: cool, still air concentrates pollution night after night, so a map that is mostly green in the monsoon can turn orange and red from October to February. Reading the map with the season in mind helps you separate a genuine spike from the normal rhythm of the year.

Turning the map into a decision

The practical value of the map is that it answers everyday questions quickly. Is it a good morning for a run, or should the workout move indoors? Should a child's outdoor sports practice be rescheduled? Is it worth wearing a well-fitted N95 today, or closing the windows and switching on a purifier? A green or light-green dot means go ahead; yellow means sensitive people should take it easy; orange, red or maroon means limit time outdoors and protect the people most at risk — children, older adults, pregnant people, and anyone with asthma, other lung conditions or heart disease. This is general guidance, not medical advice; for a specific condition, follow your doctor's plan.

Zooming, clustering and the shape of the country

At a national zoom the map is a mood board for the whole country: you can see at a glance whether the bad air is concentrated in one region or spread across many. As you zoom in, dots that overlapped at low zoom separate out, so a smear of red across the north resolves into individual cities you can tell apart and click. This layering is deliberate — the map is meant to be read at whatever scale matches your question. If you want to know "how is India doing today?", stay zoomed out and read the colour balance. If you want "how is my district doing?", zoom in until the nearby cities separate, then open the one closest to you. The same map answers both the national and the local question depending on how close you look.

Particulate matter: why the map looks the way it does

If you watch the map over several days, you will notice that the worst dots almost always cluster in the same regions, and the reason is particulate matter. Across India the dominant pollutant — the one that sets the headline AQI — is usually PM2.5 or PM10, the fine and coarse particles produced by combustion, dust, industry and burning. Fine particulate matter is especially important because it is small enough to bypass the body's natural defences and lodge deep in the lungs, which is why it is the pollutant most closely tied to health harm. When a city glows red on the map, it is nearly always because its particulate load has climbed, not because of a single unusual gas. If you want to understand the science behind those dots, our explainer on why PM2.5 matters goes deeper, and each city's report names the exact dominant pollutant so you can confirm what is driving the colour.

How the map fits with the other tools

The map is the overview layer of DailyAQI, and it is most powerful when you use it alongside the more focused tools. When the map shows a worrying colour near you, the AQI near me feature pins down the closest monitoring city and the distance to it, so you know how representative the reading is for your exact location. When two regions look different and you want to quantify the gap, the compare tool puts any two cities side by side with their live numbers and categories. And when you want the full detail behind a single dot — the pollutant table, the health note, the 24-hour and 7-day trends — you open the city page. Think of the map as the map, and the other tools as the ways to zoom in on what it reveals.

What the map cannot tell you

An honest guide has to describe the limits of the tool. A map dot represents the city's monitoring stations, not the air on your specific street, and pollution can vary sharply over short distances — heavier next to a busy road or a construction site, lighter in a park. The map is also a snapshot of the current hour, not a forecast; it will not tell you what the air will do this evening, only what it is doing now. And it can only show places that are measured, so a blank area on the map means "no monitor here," not "clean air here." Treat the map as a fast, reliable overview of measured conditions, and pair it with common sense about your immediate surroundings.

Getting the most from the map

A few habits make the map far more useful. Reload it when you arrive, so you are reading the latest hour rather than a cached view. Zoom in on dense urban clusters to separate neighbouring cities whose dots overlap at low zoom. Click through to a city whenever a colour surprises you, because the dominant pollutant and trend often explain a reading that looks odd at first glance. And check the map at different times of day if you are planning outdoor activity, since the same city can shift a full category between a still morning and a breezy afternoon.

Putting the map on your own site

If you run a news, weather, school or community site, you can share the same live picture with your readers. DailyAQI offers free, copy-paste widgets — a compact city badge, a city card, a most-polluted ranking, a national distribution bar and an auto-locating "near me" card — that update automatically and link back to the full report. They are a lightweight way to add trustworthy, hourly-fresh air-quality data without building anything yourself, and because they read the same live feed as the map, your readers always see current conditions.

Key takeaways

• The live map colours every monitored city by its current AQI so you can read a whole region at a glance.
• Colours follow the six CPCB categories; India uses the CPCB scale, other countries the US EPA scale — compare categories, not just numbers.
• Particulate matter (PM2.5/PM10) is almost always what drives the worst dots.
• Only cities with a working government monitor appear; use "AQI near me" for the closest reading to you.
• The map refreshes hourly, shows "data updating" instead of stale values, and reflects stations — not your exact street.
• Read it with region and season in mind, then act — especially to protect sensitive groups on orange, red and maroon days.