Quality of life is becoming an important component of overall assessment in health care settings. However, satisfactory instruments are not available for use in India. Qualitative and quantitative work was conducted at the Delhi centre as a part of the WHOQOL (World Health Organization Quality of Life) project at 15 centres in developing and developed countries to construct a new quality of life instrument (WHOQOL). The pilot field trial at Delhi was conducted on 304 adult subjects using the 236-item questionnaire. Based on the pilot field trial data, item reduction could be done to develop a 100-item version (WHOQOL-100, Hindi). The items are distributed into 4 domains (physical; psychological, social and environmental health) and 25 facets. Each facet has four items, rated on a five-point scale. The initial psychometric properties of this instrument are satisfactory. A 26-item short version has also been developed (WHOQOL-Bref, Hindi). The WHOQOL-100, Hindi appears to be a suitable instrument for comprehensively assessing quality of life in health care settings. WHOQOL-Bref, Hindi can be used for intervention studies including drug trials.