Uneven solution

Car rationing only partially addresses the pollution crisis

The impending return of the odd-even car-rationing system for private cars in Delhi for a week after Diwali points to the failure of cooperative federalism. The objectives of these restrictions, introduced in 2016 and also imposed in 2019, are based on the assumption that vehicular pollution will reduce the level of the dangerously toxic PM2.5. Cars also account for 80 per cent of nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide emission. The problem is that the data on whether the odd-even scheme works suggests that the impact is negligible. An IIT Kanpur study of the 2016 scheme found a 2-3 per cent decrease in PM2.5. A study by Delhi Technological University found a 5.73 per cent reduction in PM2.5 levels, on average, and 4.70 per cent in PM1, which researchers posit, could be the result of fewer cars travelling faster and less idling time at traffic lights. These findings do not suggest that odd-even is a silver-bullet solution to winter pollution. A suite of policy options is required to address the problem and that calls for sensible cooperation between the state governments of Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab, as well as the Centre.

People living in the two other megacities that make up the National Capital Region (NCR) — Noida in Uttar Pradesh, and Gurugram in Haryana — will know that toxic air is not a dubious privilege of those living in Delhi. The fact that the lives and livelihoods of all three bustling cities overlap is also self-evident. It is also evident that pollution has worsened despite a landmark shift of public transport vehicles to compressed natural gas (CNG) and increasingly electric options, and the closure of polluting industries and a power plant on the city’s outskirts. Diesel vehicles from neighbouring states still ply in those cities and Delhi — diesel being considered a relatively “dirty” fuel in India. Construction dust, the by-product of a post-Covid boom in all cities, is also playing a role in contaminating the air. But vehicles and construction are year-round factors; they contribute to winter pollution because low wind speeds cannot dissipate the particulate matter as they do in the summer and monsoon. Neither of these factors plays quite as central a role as the crop stubble burning in Punjab, Haryana and, to an extent, UP after every kharif season harvest. This factor became acute after 2009, when the Punjab and Haryana governments reconfigured sowing patterns to conserve a catastrophically falling water table.

These stubble-burning fires, which gather in intensity just before Diwali as farmers prepare their fields for rabi crops, account for 25-35 per cent of the winter pollution in the NCR. It follows, therefore, that addressing this severe seasonal pollution demands an inclusive approach. Though both Haryana and Punjab have offered incentives to reduce stubble burning, their policies have not had a significant impact. The upshot is that the Delhi government is being forced to impose a policy that the Supreme Court has dismissed as “mere optics”. If all three jurisdictions cooperated to create more efficient public transport networks to discourage private transport and worked with the Centre on impactful solutions to the chronic stubble-burning problem, the NCR’s citizens could be spared the annual miseries of winter.