Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are using a hands-on approach to learn more about India’s harmful air pollution. The technique is called mobile monitoring, which involves driving in traffic with a mobile device to measure real-time data of air pollution.

"One of the great things about these mobile monitors is that they can tell you the level of air pollution every second, so that when you see a dirty bus go by, the levels go up and then they go down again and you can really see that happening in real time on the screen right in front of you whereas a typical government monitor will tell you a level on average over an hour. So you don’t get to see these individual spikes."

Study leader Josh Apte, who went to New Delhi, says that the standard air monitors used in cities around the world are typically placed on rooftops, which only give the background levels of air pollution.

"We took advantage of these very mobile instruments to make measurements of people’s exposure to air pollution in traffic, which had not really be done in a real-time way for air pollution in cities in India before."