Gurgaon: The city saw 220 days when air quality was ‘good’ and just 145 ‘bad’ ones in 2023, according to data tabled by the environment ministry in Parliament in response to a Lok Sabha question. The year after was only marginally worse with 201 good days and 164 bad ones. And 2025 wasn’t bad either with 186 ‘good’ days and 149 ‘bad’ ones.Surprised? There’s good reason to be.A closer look at data presented in the House shows these ‘good’ days are not the same as ‘good’ days on the official air quality index. Govt’s answer in Lok Sabha on July 27 clubs readings under three separate categories of the AQI scale — good (AQI 0-50), satisfactory (51-100) and moderate (101-200) — under the single label of ‘good’. Similarly, poor, very poor and severe days are grouped together as ‘bad’ days. As a result, moderate air quality days, which are not officially ‘good’ and can still pose health risks to sensitive groups, got clubbed with genuinely clean air days, which were few and far between.Official Central Pollution Control Board data shows in 2023, the city did not record a single day in the official good AQI category — its 220 ‘good’ were actually 49 satisfactory days and 171 moderate days. The picture barely changed in 2024: of 201 ‘good’ days, only one was officially good, with the rest split between 60 satisfactory and 140 moderate days. The trend continued into 2025, when just nine of 186 ‘good’ were officially good, against 59 satisfactory and 118 moderate days.Taken together, the data shows that while the city has seen fewer poor, very poor and severe days over time, most of that improvement reflects a shift to moderate conditions and not genuinely clean air. Over the full three-year period, the city recorded just 10 officially good AQI days.Likewise, in the Lok Sabha reply, Faridabad, among the state’s most polluted cities, logged more than 200 ‘good’ days in both 2023 and 2024 despite frequent spells of poor air. Manesar recorded over 240 ‘good’ days in 2023 and nearly 270 in 2024 under the same classification.Manoj Kumar of Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) said the problem lies in how the numbers are communicated, not in the numbers themselves. “Using the same term for an aggregated metric that combines good, satisfactory and moderate may create confusion. The underlying data doesn’t need to change but the terminology does, so the public can tell official AQI categories apart from aggregated reporting,” he told TOI.Clearer labelling, he said, would help people distinguish days of genuinely clean air from days that were simply less polluted than the worst categories.
