You don't need to code to make India's air data better

Published: 18 July 2026 | Author: Team JanVayu | Reading time: 4 min

People assume there are two ways to help a project like JanVayu: write code or send money. We are not taking donations right now, and most of what moves this project forward is not code. A citizen in Kanpur tells us the chatbot gave a wrong answer. A teacher in Chennai translates a panel into Tamil. Someone notices a number looks off and says so.

We rebuilt our Contribute page to ask for specific help, and to make sending it take about a minute.

A hand-drawn diagram: seven ways to contribute: testing the chatbot, adding a testimony, suggesting a sourced fact, translating a panel, reporting something stale, writing code, running social, all flowing into one inbox where a real teammate reads them, and from there into the project moving forward

Seven ways to help

Test Vayu Gauraiya, our chatbot. This is the most useful thing a non-coder can do. Ask JanVayu hard or imaginative questions, in any language, such as "how do I convince my RWA to stop burning leaves?" If an answer invents a fact, cites a source that doesn't exist, or just feels off, send us the exact question and answer. We check the bot every week, and your example becomes a test that stops that failure coming back. (More on those weekly checks in The Robots That Keep JanVayu Honest.)
Add your testimony. Tell us, in your language, what the air is like where you live: the smell in November, the child who coughs, the day you could not see the end of the street. Real voices belong on the Citizen Testimony wall, and they carry something no monitor does.
Suggest a sourced fact for the "Did You Know" wall. One rule: say where it is from. We never publish an unsourced number, a rule we reinforced after finding a citation that didn't exist on our own site.
Translate a panel into Hindi, Tamil, Marathi or Bengali. Clean-air information locked in English does not reach most of India.
Report something stale or wrong: a figure that looks off, a broken link, an out-of-date claim, a layout problem on your phone. You are our best detector of stale content. Our automated checks are the second line.
Write code. If you do code, pick a good first issue and start with CONTRIBUTING.md. The whole platform is open source.
Run our social media. We are deliberately not on social media yet, because being nowhere is better than being there badly. If you would enjoy running it well, join the team and lead it.

Where it goes

Everything goes to the same place: the contribute form on the Contribute page. Fill in your name, email, what you would like to help with and a message. It reaches us two ways at once, as an email to a person on the team and as a stored record so nothing is lost. If you prefer plain email, write to contribute@janvayu.in. Either way, a person reads it and replies.

Why we ask so specifically

A vague appeal gets vague help. "Support us!" mostly produces guilt. "Ask the chatbot a hard question in your mother tongue and tell us if it lies" is something a person can do on the commute home, and it makes JanVayu better that same week.

We are a small volunteer team and cannot do everything. A hundred people each doing one concrete thing can keep a citizen-led air-quality record honest and current.

The Contribute page has the form. Every submission reaches a real teammate.