 stations, 33 are operating in Delhi and most of the cities have just one continuous station, which is not a representative sample in any calculation. In September 2017, the total number of continuous stations was 74 – that is a 50% increase in 6 months but still long ways from being representative of what is needed in Indian cities.
I estimated that to spatially and temporally represent the pollution levels in India, we require 4,000 continuous stations – 2,800 in the urban areas and 1,200 in the rural areas. We need to move away from the manual monitoring network to continuous monitoring network, with real-time data dissemination, to reflect on latest information, instead of looking at data from 2 years ago.