Five years is long enough to judge whether a new idea is taking root. When the Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan was introduced in 2022-23 under the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), its purpose was simple: encourage cities to move beyond drawing up clean-air plans and start implementing them. The annual assessment offered a way to recognise cities tackling major sources of pollution, while fostering competition among urban local bodies. Five years on, the initiative has evolved considerably.
The 2026 survey ranked Lucknow first among cities with populations of more than 1 million, followed by Indore, Jabalpur, Bhopal and Agra. But the leaderboard tells only part of the story. More revealing is the journey behind the rankings.
Cities have broadened their interventions, while the assessment itself has become more structured. The conversation on clean air has also gradually shifted from awareness and planning towards implementation, verification and, increasingly, the sharing of lessons.
The five-year milestone therefore offers an opportunity to ask a more useful question than simply which city ranked first: what can India's leading cities teach the rest of the country about keeping urban air cleaner?
The evolution of the Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan (SVS) is an important part of the story. Initially, the framework assessed cities on the measures they were taking to tackle major sources of pollution and implement their city-specific Clean Air Action Plans. Cities reported their progress through the PRANA portal, linking the survey closely to the implementation architecture of NCAP.
Over time, the methodology has become more systematic. The assessment now covers defined sectors, including road dust, biomass and municipal solid waste burning, construction and demolition dust, vehicular and industrial emissions, as well as public-awareness activities and improvements in PM10 (particulate matter smaller than 10 microns) levels.
For Category-I cities, the published framework assigns 20 per cent each to road dust, vehicular emissions, industrial emissions and the burning of biomass and municipal solid waste. The remaining components carry smaller weights.
The relatively modest 2.5 per cent weighting given to improvements in PM10 levels is deliberate. The survey measures the effectiveness of a city’s pollution-management efforts rather than air quality itself, since pollution concentrations are heavily influenced by factors beyond municipal control. As the programme matures, however, there is a case for debating whether measured outcomes should carry greater weight. The five-year dataset now offers an opportunity to examine that question.
The assessment process has also become more rigorous. What began an an exercise in city self-assessment has evolved into a multi-stage process, involving scrutiny by state governments, evaluation by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and field verification of shortlisted cities by independent committees. The 2026 assessment has gone a step further by extending the survey to the ward level, with more than 7,400 wards participating across the country.
This marks an important institutional shift. The survey no longer relies solely on cities reporting what they have done; it requires them to demonstrate progress through a structured framework and multiple levels of assessment. In this respect, the evolution of Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan reflects a broader shift in India’s clean-air governance: from raising awareness to implementing action.
The 2026 results become more revealing when viewed alongside previous assessments. Among cities with populations of more than 1 million, the five leading performers are Lucknow, Indore, Jabalpur, Bhopal and Agra. Their trajectories show that there is no single path to becoming a high-performing clean-air city. Lucknow has climbed sharply to reclaim the top position it held in the inaugural edition, after slipping down the rankings in subsequent years. During these years, Indore has remained consistently near the top, while Jabalpur has risen rapidly into the leading group and maintained its position. Bhopal’s progress has been more gradual, whereas Agra has consistently featured among the stronger performers.
These differences matter. An annual ranking shows where cities stand in a particular year, while a five-year trajectory indicates how they build and sustain the capacity to manage pollution.
For policymakers, the latter question is arguably more useful. What changed in a city? Which interventions became routine rather than the one-off measures? Which institutions took responsibility? Where did implementation improve? And which approaches could other cities adapt to their own circumstances?
This is where the survey’s value extends beyond competition. By tracking progress over time, it offers cities an opportunity to learn from one another, identify effective practices and adapt them to local conditions.
There is one important distinction to bear in mind when interpreting the rankings: The Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan assesses efforts to manage air pollution; it is not a direct ranking of ambient air quality. The 2026 results show why this distinction matters.
Lucknow topped the rankings with a score of 198 out of 200, reflecting its performance in implementing pollution-control measures, even though its average PM10 concentration for 2025-26 was about 135 micrograms per cubic metre—above the national annual standard of 60 and considerably higher than Indore’s 76, despite the latter finishing second. A high SVS score, in other words, reflects sustained efforts to tackle pollution, not necessarily clean air.
This distinction can easily be lost when cities are described as the “cleanest” or “best” on the strength of their SVS rankings. But it is fundamental to the survey's design. Most of the score is based on action across major pollution sectors. Improvements in PM10 concentrations are included, but account for only 2.5 per cent of the score for Category I cities.
That is not a flaw in the survey; it rather reflects what the survey is designed to measure. Measuring air pollution does not, by itself, make the air cleaner. Cities need systems to control road dust, waste burning, construction activity, vehicle emissions, industrial pollution and other sources. Building and maintaining those systems requires planning, implementation, enforcement, resources and sustained institutional commitment.
The SVS therefore answers an important question: is a city putting in place, and effectively implementing, the machinery needed to manage air pollution? Ambient air-quality monitoring answers a different one: what is happening to the concentration of pollutants in the air people breathe. Both measures matter. So the most useful assessment of urban air-quality performance will come from examining the two datasets together.
There are encouraging signs in ambient air quality, too. According to figures from the 2026 assessment of the NCAP, released by the Union environment ministry on Swachh Vayu Diwas 2026, as many as 108 of the 130 cities recorded lower PM10 concentrations in 2025-26 than in the baseline year of 2017-18.
Seventy-two cities recorded reductions of more than 20 per cent, while 26 achieved reductions exceeding 40 per cent. Fourteen cities met the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These are significant gains.
But they raise a further question for the Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan: which pollution-control measures are translating into sustained improvements in air quality?
The answer is unlikely to be straightforward. Concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 are influenced by meteorological conditions, pollution transported across regions, changing emissions, urban growth and other factors beyond the control of any single municipal authority.
That is what makes the five-year SVS dataset potentially valuable. The next step is not to replace an assessment of management efforts with another air-quality league table, but to examine the two alongside each other. Cities that have strengthened controls on road dust, for instance, could examine whether particulate concentrations have fallen over time. Improvements in waste management could be assessed against trends in open burning, while changes in transport policy could be compared with pollution levels along major traffic corridors.
Such comparisons would not, by themselves, establish causation. But they would help cities ask more useful questions: which interventions appear to be working, where, and under what conditions? That is the next step towards evidence-based management of urban air pollution.
This year's results offer a particularly interesting case study in Madhya Pradesh. Indore, Jabalpur and Bhopal occupy three of the top five positions among the million-plus cities. Their significance lies not simply in their strong performance, but in the different trajectories they represent within broadly similar institutional and regulatory settings. Indore offers an example of sustained high performance; Jabalpur demonstrates how quickly a city can enter the leading group and maintain its position; Bhopal's progress has been more gradual.
So rather than asking which city offers a model to replicate, it may be more useful to examine what can be learned from each. Which practices do they share? Where do their approaches differ? Which interventions have endured? And what role have local institutions, monitoring, enforcement and public participation played in their progress?
Such peer learning can be as valuable as the rankings themselves. The same principle applies nationally. Lucknow, Indore, Jabalpur, Bhopal and Agra do not offer a single template for clean-air management. Together, their experiences provide a range of approaches from which other cities can draw lessons and adapt practices to their own circumstances.
This may be where the Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan could make its next significant contribution. Competition matters: recognition gives cities an incentive to act, innovate and demonstrate progress. But after five years, the accumulated evidence offers an opportunity to serve a broader purpose: helping cities learn from one another.
The 2026 release of the Compendium of Best Management Practices under NCAP is a step in that direction. It brings together approaches to managing road dust, vehicular and industrial emissions, solid and construction and demolition (C&D) waste, open burning, urban greening, technology and public outreach, with the aim of helping other cities adopt successful practices.
The next step should be to make this learning more evidence-based. When a city reports a successful intervention, the important questions go beyond what it did. How much did it cost? How long did implementation take? How widely was it adopted? What obstacles emerged? Was the intervention sustained? And what changed as a result? Answering these questions would gradually turn the survey from a system for recognising performance into a national repository of evidence on urban air-pollution management.
The expansion of the assessment to ward level offers another opportunity. More than 7,400 wards participated in 2026, bringing clean-air action closer to neighbourhoods. This matters because city-wide averages can conceal substantial local differences. Pollution sources, traffic, construction activity and waste-burning hotspots vary considerably within cities. Linking ward-level interventions more closely to local air-quality monitoring and information about pollution sources could make clean-air management more targeted, shifting the focus from city-wide plans to measures designed for particular places and sources.
Five years of Swachh Vayu Sarvekshan show that India's clean-air journey is becoming more institutionalised. The assessment has evolved from a new city-level implementation framework into a more structured process involving self-assessment, state scrutiny, CPCB evaluation, field verification and, now, ward-level participation.
The cities have evolved too. Some have made rapid gains. Some have sustained strong performance. Others have improved more gradually. The 2026 results therefore deserve to be read not simply as a leaderboard, but as a snapshot of a much larger experiment in urban governance.
The survey’s achievement has been to make clean-air action visible, comparable and accountable. Its next challenge is to make the lessons from that action equally visible. The goal should not be to make every city follow the same path, but to help each understand its own pollution sources, identify interventions suited to local conditions, implement them effectively, measure their impact and learn from the experience of others.
The first five years have helped move India from awareness to action. The next five should take the journey further: from action to evidence, from evidence to learning and ultimately, from learning to cleaner air.