HOW RESPIRER IS TURNING POLLUTION INTO DATA

Respirer Living Sciences' detailed air-quality data is reshaping how cities understand, manage and cut pollution

- Samiksha Goel

When IntrCity SmartBus first decided to measure the air its passengers were breathing, the results were unsettling.

Inside some of its long-distance buses, PM2.5 levels were five to six times higher than what the World Health Organization (WHO) considers safe, even though the cabins were sealed off by air-conditioning. PM2.5 is fine particulate matter, less than 2.5 microns in diameter, and is a pollutant.

"The AC was on, people felt fine. But the data told a very different story," said Manish Rathi, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of IntrCity SmartBus. As the buses moved out of cities, through industrial belts and construction-heavy corridors, fine particulate matter seeped in steadily, turning what should have been a controlled indoor environment into a moving pocket of pollution.

IntrCity turned to Respirer, a Pune-based air quality-focused climate-tech startup, for a full retrofit. Today, every IntrCity SmartBus functions like a moving air-quality lab. Calibrated sensors track PM2.5, the air quality index (AQI), carbon dioxide, temperature and humidity inside the cabin, while simultaneously sensing outdoor air quality through Respirer's city-level sensor network. That data flows into Respirer's analytics platform, which decides, automatically, when filtration needs to be ramped up and how air quality can be kept within safe limits.

For passengers, the experience is simple. Real-time air quality readings show up on in-bus screens and on the IntrCity app. For operations teams, dashboards break the data down by route and vehicle, flagging alerts and maintenance needs. In early deployments, these buses managed to keep in-cabin PM2.5 levels around 30 micrograms per cubic metre for over 90% of the journey, on days when outdoor pollution in Delhi crossed 200.