Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was all cautious praise on Thursday when he shared a report showing the top 10 most-polluted cities worldwide, wherein Mumbai was in the second spot, but Delhi was nowhere in the picture. But, asit turns out, Delhi CM was too late in tweeting the information.

Just a few hours after his tweet, the tables turned when the national capital was ranked at the top of the list of most polluted global cities. Around 2 pm on Thursday, Delhi was the most polluted city worldwide as per data released by IQAir. Even when Kejriwal had tweeted the information around 9 am, Delhi was second on the IQAir list.

IQAir is a Swiss air tracking index and a real-time worldwide air quality monitor. It shows the full list of 100 global cities, ranked in order of hourly Air Quality Index (AQI), and compared with measured PM 2.5 data.

Arvind Kejriwal spoke too late

The report shared by Kejriwal on February 16 (Thursday) dates back to February 14 — meaning that the data shared by the report, which also cites IQAir as its source, was recorded on Tuesday.

Sharing the screenshot of the February 14 report, Kejriwal said: "After a long time, Delhi is not on the list of most polluted cities of the world. The efforts of Delhiites are slowly but surely paying off. Congrats Delhi! But it's still a long way to go. We have to be counted in the most clean cities of the world."

However, around 2 pm on Thursday, the ranking was as follows:

1. Delhi, India

2. Lahore, Pakistan

3. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

4. Mumbai, India

5. Accra, Ghana

The overall AQI in Delhi was in the "poor" category and was recorded at 225 on Thursday. Delhi's PM2.5 pollution has reduced by 28 percent in five years, from 135 microgram per cubic metre in 2016 to 97 microgram per cubic metre in 2022, according to the Union environment ministry's data quoted by PTI. PM10 levels have reduced by 27 percent, from 291 microgram per cubic metre in 2016 to 211 microgram per cubic metre in 2022.