The US EPA’s air pollution standards are significantly stricter than India’s, as evidenced by the fact that the 24-hour PM2.5 threshold in the US is 35 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m³), but the same parameter as India’s National Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) is 60 µg/m³. Morning scene from Narsingi in Hyderabad. | Photo credit: SIDDHANT THAKUR
Despite the uproar over rising pollution levels in the city, environmental regulators at the state and center prefer to gloss over the issue.
This was evident at a conference on ‘Air Pollution Index and Air Quality Management’ organized by the Planning Department in collaboration with the Telangana Pollution Control Board on Thursday, where TGPCB Member-Secretary G. Ravi tried to show the elephant in the room through a concave lens.
In his welcome address, Mr Ravi asked everyone to download CPCB’s ‘Sameer’ app for authentic Air Quality Index updates rather than depending on ‘false alerts’. The false alerts he described were air pollution data from third-party apps that followed US Environmental Protection Agency standards rather than Indian standards. He stated this even as he publicly admitted that US EPA standards and World Health Organization standards are stricter than Indian standards.
But Mr. Ravi refrained from justifying the difference in standards — either because India’s lungs could tolerate more pollution or if the standards were set by taking the highest pollution levels existing here as a baseline.
The US EPA’s air pollution standards are significantly stricter than India’s, as evidenced by the fact that the 24-hour PM2.5 threshold in the US is 35 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m³), but the same parameter as India’s National Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) is 60 µg/m³.
The annual limit for PM2.5 according to the US EPA is 9.0 µg/m³ for primary pollutants and 15.0 µg/m³ for secondary pollutants. In India, the annual limit for the parameter is 40 µg/m³, without distinction between primary and secondary pollutants.
Secondary pollutants, unlike primary pollutants that are directly released into the air, are created as aerosols by the chemical reaction of atmospheric gases with volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Speaking during the technical session, Mukesh Kumar Sharma, a professor at IIT Kanpur, explained that Hyderabad has relatively higher concentrations of VOCs due to the proliferation of the pharmaceutical industry. However, India has no official measure to quantify secondary pollutants.
Mr. Ravi’s comments come in the wake of observations by leading global economist and former IMF chief Gita Gopinath that the air pollution crisis is hurting the Indian economy more than any tariffs.
He found a flaw in third-party apps that claimed to get data from the TGPCB’s continuous air quality monitoring stations, but used US EPA standards and even WHO guidelines to assess pollution instead of India’s NAAQS. The same results are compared with the Delhi air quality index, which is calculated according to Indian standards.
According to Indian standards, for AQI to be rated good, PM2.5 should be in the range of 0-30 µg/m³, while US EPA standards rate AQI as good if PM2.5 is in the range of 0-15.4 µg/m³.
Published – 30 Jan 2026 20:30 IST
