Thanks to @bryan_johnson, last year was a watershed moment for air quality in India, right?

The team at our Foundation, @RainmatterOrg, took on the problem and set out to figure out steps we can take as citizens to help solve it.

In April, we launched an open, pan-India air in partnership with others. The goal was to give citizens, schools, local governments, and communities direct access to the data that affects their daily lives. (Check out the platform in comments)

And now we are inviting you all to come help us.

Want to host an air-quality sensor and add your neighbourhood to the map?

You can,

📍 See pollution levels around your neighbourhood
📊 Understand when and where pollution spikes
🗺️ Put your neighbourhood on Bengaluru’s public clean-air map
👥 Combine the data with what residents know is happening on the ground.

👉 Apply to host: oaq.notf.in/deployments

We know the names of 168,031 species from India. For most of them, the name is nearly all we know.

Biologists describe 7 gaps in what we know about species. Picture them as a pyramid. In India, only the base is solid. 🧵

You don't need an API key or an account. Nothing should stand between people and the knowledge we need to protect our biodiversity.

Know a group of plants or animals? Every ID you confirm and every record you add on iNaturalist closes a gap a little.

Overlooked: overlooked-india.pages.dev
Add it to your AI assistant: overlooked-india.pages.dev/mcp
bharatlas: bharatlas.com
The data story that started it: overlooked-species.surge.sh
The 7 gaps (Hortal et al. 2015): doi.org/10.1146/annure…

#Biodiversity #OpenData

1/ You can see what's in your water. Can you see what's in your air?

I upgraded mugilu this week. 🧵

7/ For builders: open JSON and an MCP server, so your AI assistant can answer with live data. All public sources, all credited. Code is MIT.

8/ Try it and install it: mugilu.live
On a screen: mugilu.live/display
Code: github.com/urbanmorph/mug… ⭐
The Mumbai story: firstpost.com/explainers/gas…

1/ India has 6.38 crore public records of plants and animals. A record is one plant or animal at one place on one date.

96% of the records are birds.

But only 1,633 of the 49,398 species on record are birds. The other 47,765 species share 4% of the records. 🧵

10/ Museum specimens online per km², compared with India: Brazil: 9x South Africa: 22x Mexico: 46x

None of them is a high-income country. They did not wait for new surveys.

11/ The fixes are within reach: • Put the national specimen collections online • Clear the identification queue • Make open licences the default • Publish new species as data, not PDFs • Assess India's endemic plants

Full story, with a state map: overlooked-species.surge.sh