The national capital is undergoing an annual, almost ritualistic, set of motions built around facing and outraging about pollution. A climate condition that begins to assert itself around Diwali and lasts till peak winters gets the political class and the commentariat agitated: the politician across the party divides feel it is their chance to be counted with the voter, while the commentariat is moved by the sight of a beloved city slowly falling into a dark abyss of smog.
Across party lines—the National Capital Territory of Delhi has seen governments of all possible political formations ever since the Supreme Court shook the city transport system by banning diesel buses and forcing it on CNG fuel in 1998—the political class seems to be more moved by the optics of action, be it as the government or as the opposition, than by grounded acts policy innovation and effective enforcement.
However, the commentariat and the media have asserted constant pressure on the decision-makers to elicit measures to combat pollution that look good on paper, even if they fall short on the ground. The courts as oversight bodies have also played their part and arm-twisted the political class into action.
Despite this dynamics and the global discourse on climate change putting ever more pressure on the government of the day, the fate of Delhi has not changed.
All solutions devised by the governments—both at the Centre and in the city—and creation of multi-agency regulatory bodies fall short of meeting expectations of Delhiites. As one begins to explore the reasons for these measures failing to translate into meaningful, sustained improvement of the city air, a complicated, and somewhat confused, picture of a tangle of implementation gaps, structural growth, regional spill-in, and mis-prioritisation emerges.
City loves its cars
It was not without a reason that the Supreme Court targeted polluting vehicles of the public transport in its first major order to fight air pollution in Delhi and nearby areas. Its other important order in this class included banning vehicles which are more than 15 years old in the petrol category and more than 10 years old in diesel from the city roads. Delhi has one of the highest vehicle density among metros in the country. It has been rightly blamed as the essential contributor of air pollution.
An equally strong vehicle density in the National Capital Region (NCR) towns, adjoining Delhi, add to further pressure on the city air.
Data from the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR), a collective of activists and development practitioners, suggests that there has been an increase of around 40 per cent in the volume of vehicles in the NCR in the last 10 years.
The government and judiciary’s response to this cause of pollution, apart from the one mentioned above, is to encouraging private ownership of electric vehicles, moving the CNG fleet of public transport to electric buses, and expanding the Delhi Metro network within the city and connect them to Metro lines in the NCR towns. Every year when the AQI graph starts rising, the government also hauls up vehicles that ply without the mandatory Pollution Under Control (PUC) certificates and enforce the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP).
Yet, as analyst Manoj Kumar of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) warns, they produce little results because of poor implementation of what the government calls effective solutions. He says, “The PUC certificate directive, for example, also does not work. At PUC stations, you do not even have to start the engine of your vehicle to let the executive record its emission reading. They just take a photo and issue the certificate.”
Kumar also makes the important point, which makes implementation of any measure impractical, that among all sources of Delhi’s pollution “only 50 per cent is from local sources, the remaining coming from the neighbouring NCR towns”.
Increasingly, evidence is mounting that any gain the capital may obtain out of the policy push for greener vehicles is offset by a voluminous increase in the absolute number of vehicles that ply through the city. This situation can be compared to the composition of the national energy basket, where India has made impressive gains in adding the renewable component in the last decade but it continues to be one of the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on account of the absolute consumption of fossil fuels rising every year.
As Gufran Beig, chair professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies and founder-director of SAFAR, notes: “The growth in the absolute number of vehicles is quite high. The progress made by the introduction of electric and cleaner vehicles is being nullified by the growth in the number of vehicles. Road infrastructure in the city has also not kept pace with the increase in vehicular volume. So, traffic jams have increased.”
Another problem Delhi faces is that the share of commercial vehicles in the city may be low in its overall vehicle profile—in 2022–23, the city had 2,65,739 commercial vehicles as opposed to 20,71,115 cars, according to the data published the Delhi government—but they are a heavy contributor to Delhi’s air pollution episodes. “Heavy and low-duty commercial vehicles make up just two per cent of all vehicles in the city, but contribute to 20 per cent of all emissions,” says Beig, underscoring that targeting high-emitters, rather than every vehicle, should have been the government’s priority.
Targeting air pollution caused by vehicles, therefore, is not likely to yield results in future as well, as no government has addressed the increase in number of vehicles or segregated monitoring of polluting vehicles as per their pollution profile. Then, there is the issue of cross-border ownership of vehicles that stops any government to develop an integrated approach to solve the problem as coordinating among different state governments that are often run by competing political interests becomes an impractical idea.
Dust that does not settle
When the city plunges into a thick brown haze, dust often becomes a convenient scapegoat. Indeed, the government bodies have taken measures to control dust in the air, including sweeping and water-sprinkling, mandating dust-mitigation plans for construction projects, and increasing green-belt coverage.
Abhishek Kar of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), argues that Delhi “can cut air-quality impact from construction activities by half in three years through a focused plan, like upgrading its Construction & Demolition Waste portal with semi-automated alerts, strengthening recycling via procurement mandates and incentives, and requiring dust-mitigation plans for all new projects by 2028”.
But, observers argue that government efforts in controlling dust misses the point, largely because many of these actions are short-term fixes and focus on larger particles (PM10) rather than the fine particles (PM2.5) that pose the worst health risks. As Beig sharply notes, “Mitigating dust pollution is a misplaced priority. We seem to be focusing too much on PM10. Dust contributes just 10 to 15 per cent towards PM2.5, compared to 40 to 50 per cent towards PM10.” He adds that dust-mitigation is a quick-fix solution that lasts just 24 hours and water-sprinkling, anyway, does not help in settling PM2.5, and, in fact, “might help in multiplying it”.
CREA’s Kumar argues that Delhi has way too many construction sites, which is a nightmare for any monitoring body. “Moreover, few roads have pavements on both sides. When you have soil on both sides, water sprinklers and sweeping machines will only help for a few hours,” he says, concurring with Beig.
The scale of construction in the city, its unpaved edges, the transient nature of soil accumulation, and lesser contribution to fine particulate matter mean that the visible “action” of sprinkling or sweeping, however politically correct they might be, masks the structural challenge in removing pollution.
So, while dust-control is necessary, over-emphasis on it, relative to other sources, and a shallow reach in targeting it reduce its impact.
Neighbourhoods crop up seasonally
In news cycles each autumn, the burning of paddy residue in Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh receives heavy coverage as one of Delhi’s major pollution triggers.
Since plumes of smoke from stubble burning episodes can be seen in satellite imagery and plotted on state maps, they attract widespread attention and start trending on social media. During certain peak days of pollution episodes in Delhi, they do contribute sharply to Delhi’s smog burden. The governments of Punjab and Haryana claim to have deployed over 2.5 lakh machines for crop residue management at 33,000 custom-hiring centres, while thermal plants of Delhi and other towns have been directed to adopt biomass co-firing in their fuel mix.
However, Kumar brings a sobering perspective: “With regard to stubble-burning, the peak burning season is very short. Last year, its contribution to Delhi’s pollution exceeded 30 per cent on just two days. On the remaining days, it was well below five per cent.” The implication of this data is clear: while it may appear dramatic, the stubble-burning window is narrow. It cannot substitute for year-round emission control. Moreover, operational issues abound on the field, as machines may be available, but farmers lack incentives or the know-how to use them, and biomass co-firing faces “non-availability throughout the year”, says Kumar.
Beig adds another dimension to the waste-burning issue as a contributing factor to the city’s pollution. He says, “While stubble burning is acute during a short window, the broader issue of open-waste and biomass burning in urban/peri-urban areas remains more persistent and less addressed.” In short, the pollution-combat narrative has, perhaps, over-focused on stubble as the culprit, instead of broader biomass/waste-burning sources as bigger structural contributors to air pollution.
Data crunch of industries
Industrial and power-generation emissions may no longer be the dominant, visibly filthy source in Delhi, but they remain significant. Regulators have long mandated emission norms, required large factories and power plants to install continuous-monitoring equipment, and, during smog episodes, invoked GRAP restrictions, such as curbs on high-pollution operations.
However, the results again fall short. Kumar emphasises, “Many industries do not send out emissions data, which should be uploaded to the Online Continuous Pollution Monitoring system. They must be penalised for the omission. If data is missing, we will not be able to determine the source of pollution.”
Beig points out that the formal sector industries are not that harmful. The major threat is from informal factories, which are not even registered and are unregulated. These are also growing quite fast.
It shows that while the government is busy chasing large industry, even if its footprint is low in the city, the problem lies with smaller units, which are scattered, informal, and are able to evade monitoring with ease. And, given the nature of these factories, it is futile to expect credible emission data from them, which makes the process of fine-tuning policy that much more difficult.
At the same time, a lot of these smaller units are located in Delhi’s neighbourhood, which, in itself, was a policy decision to decongest Delhi and move factories away from the heart of the city. This led to multiplicity of authorities across states that track these units, making real-time monitoring of unregistered units a difficult task, resulting in industrial emissions in the city and its neighbourhood contributing significantly to Delhi’s particulate load.
Can the city breathe?
Observers believe that the air pollution crisis is not merely about seasonal anomalies; rather, it is the consequence of systemic gaps. The path forward is clear, if governments can muster political will.
As Kumar emphasises, “People’s awareness helps in mitigating the crisis, but regulation and implementation must come from the government.” It is not that Delhi is suffering from a lack of policy, because the broad contours of an environmental policy are in place. The problem,
observers point out, lies in the policy’s elucidation and execution across agencies and states.