The Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru.
| Photo Credit: File photo
A technical review report prepared by members of the IISc Sustainable Transport Lab (IST) Lab, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has called for the scrapping and roll-back of the current Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan ranking framework, stating that there are major discrepancies in the approach and methodology.
Letter to Union Minister
The report titled ‘Analysis of the Framework of Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan’ has been prepared by Prof. Ashish Verma, who has also written to Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupendra Yadav, stating that the technical review by his team of the Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan rankings reveal a stark dichotomy between administrative scores/ranking and ground realities.
“Top-ranking cities like Lucknow scored nearly 198 out of 200 in spite of recording very poor AQI levels of 374 in December 2025. A significant discrepancy is evident between the marks claimed and the actual conditions on the ground across participating urban local bodies (ULBs),” the letter stated.
It added that as per local media reports the road conditions do not match the marks claimed/awarded to the top three cities in Category 1. “Further, as per available official data from government websites, the marks claimed/awarded to the ULBs would be much lower than the reported ones,” it added.
Conflict of interest
Prof. Verma said that the frameworks suffers from critical flaws and vulnerabilities which include structural conflicts of interest in which ULBs act as self-assessors, misaligned weightings, the omission of key emission sources such as agricultural burning and secondary PM2.5 and a complete oversight of the scientifically robust AQI.
He further said that in case the ministry wishes to retain the existing framework then it suggested renaming it as the Swachh Vayu Action Plan Implementation Rankings to accurately reflect checklist execution rather than actual air quality.
Third party audits
“It is recommended that a rigorous new framework may please be developed featuring third-party field audits, satellite data cross-checks and citizen participation, while participation, while prioritising real-world outcomes by ensuring ambient AQI performance carries at least 50% weight in any future evaluations,” he wrote.
Published – October 12, 2026 07:24 pm IST
