India’s capital New Delhi to reprise anti-pollution car drive

India’s capital city is to reprise a two-week experiment in road-rationing, imposing new rules to restrict car use, as it seeks to clean up the world’s most polluted urban air.

From April 15, New Delhi will re-impose rules that permit each of the city’s cars to be on the roads every alternate day based on their licence plate numbers. The fortnight-long restrictions come after authorities received strong public support for a similar experiment in January.

Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of New Delhi, said surveys registered positive backing for the scheme, with fourth-fifths of those who responded to a call for public feedback endorsing the programme.

“We are seriously considering whether we can do this for 15 days every month,” he said. “We can’t do this on a permanent basis until we get better public transport.”

But analysts suggest that may be Mr Kejriwal’s eventual goal. “I think we are working towards a situation where this will be a permanent feature,” said Vikrom Mathur, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think-tank.

New Delhi is the world’s most polluted city — its air fouled by diesel exhaust, construction dust, and the burning of trash and biomaterials by those who lack clean cooking fuel.

Delhi residents have only recently woken up to their foul air — and the health risks it poses — while international companies and foreign embassies are struggling to recruit expatriates to live and work in the city.

Mr Kejriwal, leader of the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) party, has made cleaning the air an important policy priority, while India’s courts have restricted sales of luxury diesel vehicles.

There was debate over how Delhi’s air quality was affected by restrictions on car use in January, a month that normally sees some of the year’s highest pollution levels due to unfavourable weather condition.

Many Delhi residents were thrilled with the clearing of the city’s normally jammed roads, and the drop in travel times. But the city remained enveloped in a toxic haze for the first half of the trial, and although pollution levels later dropped, they remained dangerously high, prompting critics to conclude the scheme had served its purpose.

However, a study by University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute and Harvard University’s Evidence for Policy Design group, concluded that pollution levels would have been even higher without the restrictions on car use

They estimated that hour-by-hour levels of dangerous tiny particulates — which lodge in the lungs and inflict long-term damage — were reduced 10-13 per cent while the scheme was in force.

The second phase of the study appears intended to check the impact of the scheme on local ozone levels, more a problem in the hot summer than the cold winter.

However, there is resistance. India’s car industry is angered over the restrictions on car use — and sales — in the battle against air pollution. This month, Ralph Speth, chief executive of luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover — owned by India’s Tata Motors, complained that the exhaust of its vehicles was “cleaner” than the air it “sucked in” in Delhi.

This week, a group called “Campaign for People Participation in Development Planning” filed a public interest lawsuit in the Delhi High Court, claiming that road rationing “impinged on the fundamental rights of people”.

The lawsuit called the road-rationing “malicious and misdirected”, and argued New Delhi’s pollution would be curtailed with more aggressive enforcement of existing pollution control rules, rather than curbing car use.

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