Despite significant investment in monitoring, clean air action plans and performance-based funding, air quality in most Indian cities remains poor, with some cities being among the worst in the world. The question this report asks is why the spending isn’t translating into cleaner air.
Moving beyond the usual focus on technical gaps such as monitoring stations and equipment, the report identifies the structural and administrative bottlenecks such as fragmented governance, weak accountability and misdirected incentives that limit the effectiveness of current funding mechanisms.
The study combines a secondary analysis of air quality trends and fund flows across 130 non-attainment cities (drawing on the PRANA portal and CPCB sources) with specific focus on 48 Million-Plus Cities followed by field visits to nine Million-Plus Cities i.e. Patna, Varanasi, Chennai, the Mumbai Urban Agglomeration (Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai), Pune, Vadodara and Bengaluru.
Drawing on Janaagraha’s City-Systems framework, the report crystallises these issues into six challenge areas and sets out pathways to clean air before translating them into institution-specific recommendations for Finance Commissions (Union and State), MoEFCC and the Central Pollution Control Board, and State Governments and Urban Local Governments. A key output of this work was a formal submission of recommendations to the XVIth Finance Commission.
