The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) on Thursday urged local governments to meet the deadline for publishing their air quality indexes (AQI) under revised air quality standards in a conference in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province.

Wu Xiaoqing, vice minister of the MEP, said that among 496 monitoring stations across 74 cities, 138 stations have begun to publish their air quality index, and 195 have completed instrument installation and debugging by the end of September, according to China Environmental News.

Wu asked all the monitoring stations to meet the deadline of the objectives for December. He also said that both central and local governments should build systems to release AQI information to the public, the Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

The State Council of China revised air quality standards, including the addition of an index for PM2.5, on February 29.

According to the State Council, all the monitoring stations included in the first testing stage should install and test new equipment by the end of October and publish the new AQI by the end of December.

Beijing already started to release the real-time data on PM 2.5 particulates from September 29.