An in-house developed mobile and portable three-dimensional scanning lidar system is discussed in this work. The system uses a stimulated Raman-scattering technique for the continuous observation of atmospheric aerosols, clouds and trace gases. This system has a fast scanning technique with a high-speed data acquisition, and permits the real-time measurement of atmospheric pollutants with the temporal resolution of 1 min. This scanning lidar system provides typical horizontal coverage of about 8–10 km while scanning; however, in zenith mode, good quality backscattered signals can be from 20 km, depending upon the laser power and sky conditions. This versatile lidar system has also overcome the drawbacks which are popular in the traditional scanning lidar systems such as complicated operation, overlap height between laser beam and telescope field of view In this system, the optical damage is reduced by using an integral coaxial transmitter and receiver. Some of the initial results obtained from the scanning lidar system are also presented. This study shows that boundary-layer structure and land–sea breeze circulation can be resolved from the developed scanning lidar system. The application of this lidar system to measure the pollutants over an industrial area is also discussed.