A Critical Review on Indoor Air Quality Standards in India: Benchmarking India's IAQ Governance Against China and the 2047 Vision

Abstract

Indians spend most of their lives indoors, yet policy and scholarship remain fixed on outdoor air. Despite one of the world’s heaviest pollution burdens, India has no consolidated, enforceable indoor air quality (IAQ) standard, and the provisions that touch indoor spaces were written for other purposes.

We critically review the IAQ standards landscape in India, benchmark it against leading international frameworks and against China—a useful comparator that faced a similar crisis and acted—and set out a roadmap aligned with the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision.

A PRISMA 2020-guided search of peer-reviewed literature and standards documents, was paired with a comparative policy-appraisal framework spanning legal status, pollutant coverage, stringency, sectoral reach, monitoring and enforcement. Four failures recur: institutional fragmentation with no binding IAQ standard; thresholds that lag the 2021 WHO guidelines and ignore key indoor pollutants; the exclusion of the highest-exposure settings—homes, schools, healthcare and informal industries such as Agra’s leather-footwear clusters; and an enforcement and monitoring vacuum. China’s trajectory shows that a binding indoor standard, a household clean-fuel transition and target-linked enforcement can bend the curve.

India’s indoor-air governance is voluntary, fragmented and dated. Unless an explicit indoor agenda is built into the 2047 vision, rising affluence may worsen indoor exposure even as ambient air improves. We offer a five-workstream roadmap, staged to 2027, 2032, 2040 and 2047.