People assume villages = clean air and cities = pollution. But I've been noticing something that feels completely backwards

I've been noticing something a bit weird over the past year and wanted to check if anyone else has seen this.

I spend time in Dahanu (coastal, green, lots of villages) and also in Mumbai. Naturally, I always assumed Dahanu would have much cleaner air than Mumbai. But whenever I check AQI, Dahanu often shows worse numbers than Mumbai. Not drastically worse every single time, but consistently enough that it stopped feeling like a coincidence.

At first I thought maybe the data isn't reliable but then I started observing what's actually happening locally. Around villages there's a lot of dust from raw roads, vehicles blow more dust on raw roads all the time, people burning trash (including plastic), use of wood for cooking, and occasional burning of dry grass or farm waste. None of these things feel like "big pollution sources" individually, but they're kind of always present.

In Mumbai, even though traffic and construction are obvious roads are mostly paved, garbage collection is regular so you don't see ee much open burning.

I'm not trying to say villages are more polluted overall or anything like that, but this idea that greener or rural automatically means cleaner air doesn't seem to hold up all the time. Curious if others have noticed something similar or if there's something I'm overlooking here