Can the nation-wide COVID-19 lockdown help India identify region-specific strategies for air pollution?

Air pollution is a serious concern with the developing economics in India and gets more severe when it has major cities ranked among the top 30 polluted cities worldwide. To find a solution, different programs and/or policies have been launched for air quality management country-wide. Unfortunately, no such plan could effectively solve the purpose rather than an unexpected COVID-19 pandemic situation in India. Our study focused on the air pollution status and air quality index (AQI) in 42 cities (that includes 6 metros) representing North, South, East, West, Central, and North-East region of India during the pre-lockdown, four lockdowns and unlock phases. The results depict most of the pollutants except ozone (O(3)) were significantly reduced in the lockdown-1, and marginally increased in subsequent lockdown phases. Regarding the average AQI, its value was highest in North Indian cities (227), followed by East India (172), Central India (141), North-East India (130), West India (124), and South India (83) during the pre-lockdown. Due to COVID-19 induced lockdown, North Indian cities observed the highest dip in average AQI (108), followed by Central India (113), East India (82), West India (73), South India (55), and North-East India (49) in the lockdown and unlock phases. Thus, the study gave a conspicuous vision on mitigation of air pollution under this pandemic; and, if strategic centralized policies are sensibly implemented and by involving the participation of people of India, then there is a feasibility of air pollution issue management. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41324-021-00426-1.