Delhi, India’s capital, regularly experiences air quality well over ten times WHO recommendations. And in general, Indian cities have some of the highest levels of air pollution in the world, with over a million deaths associated with ambient air pollution in 2016. Yet pollution levels can vary significantly even within a neighborhood or couple of days, and policymakers continue to struggle to understand which sources are most important, while citizens try to understand what they can do to reduce their risk. EPoD is undertaking a new project to develop a network of low-cost air pollution sensors across Delhi to generate fine-grained, real-time, high-quality pollution heat maps that allow us to better understand the problem and help design and test appropriate solutions.  

This work builds on years of research and analysis by EPoD researchers and partners examining the impact of pollution on life expectancy, identifying  strategies for improving enforcement of regulation, and work with regulators to test solutions.

Principal Investigators:
Rohini Pande
Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, New York University
Anant Sudarshan, University of Chicago

This project is implemented by Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) at the Harvard Kennedy School in collaboration with EPoD India at IFMR, a joint program by EPoD at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR).