AQI blues: CAQM needs to press AI button

Created by Parliament in 2021, Commission for Air Quality Management is the statutory body responsible for managing air quality across the entire National Capital Region — Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, and adjoining districts of Haryana, UP, Rajasthan, and Punjab.

Every winter, Delhi and Gurugram slide into a season of sour air — a grey, gritty heaviness that wraps itself around homes, schools, lungs, and lives. Flights falter, children wheeze, visibility vanishes.

Air pollution control is 80% administrative coordination and only 20% technical expertise. CAQM has the technical piece — it lacks the administrative muscle. (Hindustan Times)

In moments like this, people ask: Isn’t there an authority meant to protect us? There is. It is called the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM). But to understand why the air still poisons millions, we must understand what CAQM is, what it can do, why it is structurally constrained, and what a modern, tech-enabled transformation could make possible

What is CAQM

Created by Parliament in 2021, CAQM is the statutory body responsible for managing air quality across the entire National Capital Region — Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, and adjoining districts of Haryana, UP, Rajasthan, and Punjab. It was established to replace a chaotic maze of local committees with one unified command for a problem that floats freely across state borders.

What powers CAQM actually has

On paper, CAQM has impressive authority: It can set air-quality and emission standards, shut down polluting industries and construction sites, suspend power and water supply to violators, coordinate action across five states, monitor, inspect, and investigate pollution sources, penalise offenders, with fines reaching up to ₹1 crore and issue binding directions that must be obeyed by state pollution boards, police, and municipalities.

It is stronger than any clean-air authority NCR has ever had. But the power of law is only as strong as the structure behind it.

Why CAQM struggles to deliver on its mandate

1. A leadership model without administrative force: By statute, CAQM is headed by a retired civil servant or expert. This limits effectiveness in ways the public rarely sees. A retired official — however respected — lacks the administrative clout of a serving secretary-level officer who can convene multiple ministries, command cooperation from state chief secretaries, influence budgets, ensure compliance and represent the issue in national decision-making.

Air pollution control is 80% administrative coordination and only 20% technical expertise. CAQM has the technical piece — it lacks the administrative muscle.

2. No ground force of its own: CAQM relies on state pollution boards, police forces, municipalities and district administrations. These agencies are chronically understaffed and overstretched. CAQM’s orders often wither as they move down the chain.

3. No guaranteed money or staffing: The Act does not provide a mandated budget, minimum staff strength, or dedicated district offices. A permanent crisis cannot be run with temporary resources.

4. Fragmented monitoring across NCR: Delhi has many monitors. Gurugram has some. Most NCR districts have one or two. This means vast areas remain invisible on official radar. You cannot enforce what you cannot measure.

5. Pollution is interstate, enforcement is not: Smog drifts from Punjab to Delhi to Gurugram without pausing at borders. But enforcement mechanisms remain locked within state jurisdictions. CAQM can direct states — but cannot compel them with consequences.

What we actually need: A National Clean Air Data Centre

India is fighting a 21st-century problem with 20th-century tools. What NCR urgently needs is a digital command centre — a unified platform integrating all sources of pollution data in real time. Every major polluting element generates data: industries (CEMS emissions), vehicles (traffic patterns, BS norms), construction (permits, violations), waste burning (municipal logs), stubble burning (satellite detections), weather (IMD feeds), road dust (urban data) and power consumption (DISCOM load patterns).

But today these datasets live in separate silos that don’t communicate. A National Clean Air Data Centre, legally housed inside CAQM, would unify them into one live dashboard.

What it would enable: Instant identification of industrial spikes or illegal burning, real-time hotspot detection across Delhi-NCR, street-level dust and traffic mapping, predictive alerts 24–72 hours before pollution peaks, scientific source attribution, ending political blame games, data-driven enforcement routing for inspectors and public dashboards that rebuild trust and accountability.

What makes it transformative: Artificial intelligence turns raw data into intelligence, machine-learning models forecast pollution days ahead, AI can detect smoke plumes, construction dust, or illegal chimneys in CCTV/drone footage, predictive analytics shows which actions will reduce AQI the most, long-term models guide transport, urban, agricultural, and industrial policy. This shifts CAQM from a reactive body to a proactive, predictive, precision-governance institution.

The way forward

Reforms the Government of India must consider: A serving secretary-level officer should lead CAQM. This brings administrative authority, national coordination power, and real influence in government.

CAQM should be integrated directly under the environment ministry and function as the latter’s operational arm for clean air.

Also, a five-year clean air mission fund is needed for NCR. This will ensure long-term funding for monitoring, enforcement, R&D, and public systems. Also, CAQM must have its own enforcement wing. Dedicated officers in every NCR district with real powers and accountability.

Creating a national council of environment ministers will greatly help as pollution is a national, not local, problem.

Digital data from every pollution source, with AI-based forecasting and real-time alerts can boost CAQM’s operational capabilities.

Delhi and Gurugram do not suffer from a lack of plans. They suffer from weak institutional design, missing data, fragmented enforcement, and insufficient authority. But this can change.

If CAQM is strengthened — administratively, financially, digitally, and politically — it can become the institution capable of delivering clean air to one of the world’s largest urban regions. Clean air is not a utopian dream. It is a matter of building the right system — and powering it with data, intelligence, and authority.

(The writer, India’s first female IPS officer, is former lieutenant governor of Puducherry, and can be reached at kiranbediofficial@gmail.com)