According to the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research, the overall air quality of the national capital docked at 376 at 8:30 am on Tuesday.
Total area impacted across India pegged at 18.9 mn hectares.
'It is the most prone month for the development of cyclones in the pre-monsoon period.'
The news will augur well for the country as large parts have been witnessing agriculture distress and water levels in reservoirs in west and south India have dipped to low levels.
Heavy rain alert continued in Himachal Pradesh as the monsoon intensified in the various districts of the state.
Several parts of Himachal Pradesh, including state capital Shimla, got another bout of snowfall on Monday as about 850 roads across the state remained blocked and disruption of power supply affected normal life.
5.56 lakh people have been rescued so far from the 12 flood-affected districts. The government is plying 2,821 boats for evacuation.
It was another chilly morning in the national capital as icy winds swept the city while early morning fog disrupted rail operations, delaying 52 trains.
Several places in Arunachal Pradesh, including capital Itanagar, were cut off by floods and landslides.
El Nino, which refers to warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, will likely to keep CPI inflation up at 8-10 per cent in the second half of 2014 and will pose a 50-70 basis point risk to this fiscal's growth expectation, the report by financial services major Bank of America Merrill Lynch said.
In the Northeast, while three people died in Assam, two each lost their lives in Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram in rain-related incidents.
'The last time we had such a late withdrawal of monsoon was in 1960 or so.'
Next week could see some respite from the heat.
An alert has been sounded by the Delhi government after the water level of Yamuna river crossed the danger mark, an official said.
Dozens of farmers have already committed suicide in India after damage from unseasonal rains this year.
The reasons behind a spate of forest fires in the hills this year, though, could be multi-fold.
The IMD attributed the projection to a weakening of El Nio and the Indian Ocean Dipole turning positive.
The official India Meteorological Department (IMD) and the private Skymet Weather Services have made widely divergent monsoon forecasts.
Till Thursday, the country had received 41 per cent less June rainfall than normal - the scantiest in a decade and one of the rarest occasions when the shortfall in the month was more than 30 per cent - private weather forecaster Skymet said in its daily weather forecast on Friday.
