Published: 5 August 2026 | Updated: 6 August 2026 | Author: Team JanVayu | Reading time: 7 min
India's air pollution story is told almost entirely through its cities. Delhi in November. Mumbai's winter haze. The annual ranking that puts another Indian town at the top of a global list nobody wants to lead. But about two-thirds of the country does not live in a city (Census 2011), and until now, if you went looking for your village on our map, you would not have found it.
Today you will. We have added every one of India's 584,615 villages to the live map, drawn as the administrative boundaries your panchayat and district records use. Open the map, press Villages in the row of layer buttons, and zoom in.
What you will see when you find it
Tap any village and a small card opens with its name, its district, its state and two numbers that are kept apart on purpose.
The first is an annual average: what this village breathed over a year, estimated from satellite at about one kilometre. Every village has one. Most of this post is about that figure.
The second is right now, and here the card often has to admit it does not know. If a monitor is reasonably nearby you get a live estimate, with a note saying which monitor it came from and how far away it is. If not, the card says no monitor close enough for a live estimate.
Most villages show that second message. We do not plan to fix it. It is the most accurate thing the live map can say, and it is why the annual figure matters.
Update, 6 August: this post originally went out when only the live estimate existed, and most villages showed nothing at all. The annual satellite layer shipped the next day, so every village now has a number. The paragraphs below have been updated; the argument has not changed.
The gap you can now see
India has roughly 565 continuous air quality monitoring stations (CPCB, via CREA's Tracing the Hazy Air, January 2026). Set that against 584,615 villages. The monitoring network was built where the attention is, which means in cities.
For years the answer to "how bad is the air in my village?" has been "nobody is measuring." That is easy to say and easy to forget. It is harder to forget when you are looking at a screen full of village outlines and the map keeps telling you, one tap at a time, that it does not know.
So we have made the silence visible. Zoom across rural Bihar or interior Karnataka and tap a few villages: the "right now" line keeps coming back empty. That is a picture of who India's live air monitoring covers, and who it leaves out.
What the satellite can tell us, and what it cannot
Satellites cannot tell you today's air in your village, and nobody else can either. What they can give you is the yearly average, everywhere, because they do not wait for a monitor to exist.
Every village now carries an annual PM2.5 figure derived from satellite measurements at about one kilometre, calibrated against ground monitors. Across all 584,615 villages:
Not one meets the WHO annual guideline of 5 µg/m³. Not a single village in India. Of them, 371,938 (63.6%) exceed India's own annual limit of 40. The median village sits at 43.7 µg/m³, roughly nine times the WHO guideline.
The cleanest places are the island districts, Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep, at around 12–20 µg/m³, and parts of Kerala. The five dirtiest districts are all in Delhi, at 94–98.
There are two limits. This is a yearly average, so it says nothing about a bad week in November. And a one-kilometre estimate smooths out very local sources: a brick kiln or a smelter at the edge of your village will not appear in it. Byrnihat, the small industrial town that topped IQAir's global city ranking, reads far lower on this layer than its own ground monitor does. The satellite sees the air a whole district breathes and misses the chimney next door.
Rural air is not clean air
It would be convenient if the unmeasured places were simply the clean ones. They are not.
The clearest example is indoors. About 56% of rural Indian households (41% nationally) still cook mainly with solid fuels: wood, dung cake, crop residue (NFHS-5, 2019-21, Table 2.6). The smoke builds up in their own kitchens every day, and no outdoor monitor would catch it even if one stood nearby. Women and the small children who sit beside them carry most of it.
This is why the death toll has two figures, and both are worth knowing. Ambient outdoor PM2.5 is linked to about 1.72 million deaths a year in India (Lancet Countdown 2025, using 2022 data). Count household air pollution as well and the figure rises to roughly 2.0 million (State of Global Air 2025, using 2023 data). The scopes and methods differ, and both are real. The second is where a lot of rural India lives.
Then there is pollution that ignores the city limit. Stubble smoke drifts across whole states. Brick kilns, small industry and highway traffic sit in places with no station for a hundred kilometres. A village can lie well outside a city and still be inside the same airshed.
What this layer is, and what it is not
The colours on the map are the annual satellite figure, a per-village estimate. We have not coloured villages by today's air. With 565 monitors and 584,615 villages, spreading live readings across the country and painting each village a confident shade of orange would look authoritative and mean almost nothing. It would invent precision we do not have.
So the live number stays out of the colours and sits on its own line in the card. When it appears at all, there is a monitor within about 50 kilometres, and the card names that monitor and its distance so you can judge how far to trust it. Air measured in one place is not air measured in yours.
The outlines are administrative geography, the official boundaries and nothing more. They come from the Local Government Directory via indianopenmaps.com, the community-run mirror of India's public geodata that also supplies our ward, constituency and district layers. They reflect the directory's records at the time we imported them, so a few very recent reorganisations may not have caught up yet.
Why we bothered
One kind of clean air advocacy only ever talks about the capital in winter. It gets attention, and attention matters. But it implies that the problem has an address and that most of the country is fine.
Putting 584,615 villages on a map is our small argument against that. We can now tell you roughly what each one breathes over a year, and essentially none of them are fine. What we still cannot tell you is what your village is breathing this morning. Someone chose where to put the monitors, and the gap follows from that choice.
Find your village. Open the live map, turn on Villages, and zoom in. If your village is missing, misnamed, or in the wrong district, or if you know of a monitor near you that we are not using, tell us at contribute@janvayu.in. Corrections from people who live there are the only way this gets better.