Introducing India's Air Quality Index bulletins open data 2015-24

Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) of India maintains air quality monitoring stations in 283 Indian cities. Hourly station-wise AQI and pollutant concentration data is available on National Air Quality Index portal. CPCB also releases daily AQI bulletins which report the daily average AQI for each city, number of working monitors on that day and the prominent pollutant driving AQI on that day.

Urbanemissions.info did a research project on analyzing these daily Air Quality Bulletins: AQI Analysis for Indian Cities. In this process we scraped all the bulletins from 2015 to 2024.

In this talk, I will introduce this dataset published on Datasette and research/applications we could do with this data. I'll also take a moment to introduce other open APIs on AQI to show what kind of applications could be built with such APIs.

1. Introduction to AQI data: Participants would understand the way AQI is measured and common pitfalls in understanding it, which leads to wrong interpretation of AQI data, even often by media.

2. Introduction to Datasette: Participants would be introduced to Datasette tool and how one can use it to publish open datasets and perform analytics on it.

3. Participants would also appreciate the different kinds of applications that can be built if more open data on air pollution were available.