PAVAN-I3C Centre Tracks Delhi-NCR Air Quality in Real Time

Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender Yadav visited the newly built Integrated Command and Control Centre of the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) in New Delhi on 30 October 2026 and went through its technology and its readiness to operate. The centre is named PAVAN, short for Platform for Air quality Vigilance and Analytics for NCR, and is meant to work as a single-window digital nerve centre for the capital region.

What feeds the platform

PAVAN pulls together more than 30 application programming interfaces and data streams covering air quality, emissions, weather, satellite images, cameras, traffic, public complaints and compliance records held by different agencies. Among the sources are:

• 111 continuous ambient air quality monitoring stations working across Delhi and the national capital region
• Over 2,300 industries and more than 3,200 active construction sites
• Online continuous emission monitoring systems reporting particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide
• Satellite data on crop residue burning from IARI, ISRO and FIRMS, set against fire events of the previous six years
• Vehicle data through VAHAN, congestion hotspots, live feeds from the Okhla, Bhalswa, Ghazipur, Greater Noida and Bandhwari landfills, and tracking of mechanical road sweeping machines
• Citizen complaints routed through the Green Delhi and SAMEER apps

How it is meant to work

The platform runs on the principle of detect, analyse and act. When a reading strays from a prescribed norm or a statutory direction, an alert is raised and escalated to the agency responsible, which shifts the Commission away from monitoring that depended on each agency reporting its own performance. The minister said the centre ends the lag in operations and breaks the silos in which data used to sit, letting state pollution control boards work from one verified source and fix responsibility on polluters within minutes. A farm fire, a smoking stack or an uncovered building site, he said, can now be seen, flagged and acted upon as it happens.

A construction halt in November

The minister also announced that construction and demolition work across the national capital region will be stopped from 5 to 20 November to hold down pollution. A separate module tracks pending items in the state action plans of Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh across crop residue, vehicles, road dust, solid waste, industry, diesel generator sets and green crematoria. CAQM Chairperson Rajesh Verma and CPCB Chairperson Amandeep Garg were present.