We Visited AQI Stations Across the City. Here’s What We Found

To find out whether similar water-sprinkling was taking place at other monitoring stations, The Quint visited five more of them—including monitoring stations at Mathura Road, Aurobindo Marg, Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, Siri Fort, and ITO. However, none of these locations showed evidence of active water sprinkling on 28 October.

At Mathura Road, a local shopkeeper outside the Central Road Research Institute that houses the station, however, said tankers “pass by almost every day, once or twice a day.” He added that he had spotted a water sprinkler sprinkling the highway outside around 9 am the same day.

At Aurobindo Marg, the security guard at the National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases (which houses one of the monitoring stations) said water tankers regularly sprinkle the main road outside several times a day, but do not enter the premises. A nearby shopkeeper confirmed this. Inside the campus, the operator managing the monitoring station also said that no tankers enter the area to spray water near the equipment.

These instances could just be part of the Delhi government’s GRAP-I and GRAP-II (Graded Response Action Plan) measures that include routine road sprinkling to control dust pollution. Data from the SAMEER app suggest that air quality did inexplicably improve for a couple of days after Diwali (between 23 and 25 October) before spiking again.