Delhi limits drivers to alternate days to curb pollution

Published 9:24 pm Friday, December 4, 2015

NEW DELHI – The Delhi government announced a plan Friday to curb its choking pollution levels, among the worst in the world, by limiting drivers to alternative days beginning next month.

Starting Jan. 1, residents in India’s capital city, which had been suffocating under a blanket of thick smog in recent days, will only be able to drive on alternate days based on their license plate number – odd numbers on one day, even on the other.

The plan – likely to be controversial – was announced after a Delhi high court issued a directive Thursday ordering the state and national government as well as Delhi’s pollution control committee to devise a concrete plan to address rising air pollution levels by Dec. 21.

“It seems like we are living in a gas chamber,” the court said.

Delhi’s air – a noxious combination of exhaust, dust, smoke from wood and dung-fired stoves, burning leaves and industrial output – surpassed Beijing’s last year as the dirtiest in the world, according to a study by the World Health Organization.

Friday, its concentration of PM2.5 particulate matter – the small airborne particles that enter people’s lungs and pose a major health threat – was a “hazardous” 652 at one point in the afternoon, compared to an “unhealthy” 180 in Mumbai and Hyderabad, two other major Indian cities.

Officials say they hope the measure will reduce pollution levels by 50 percent. They also plan to shutter Delhi’s large coal-fired power plant and make Euro VI emission norms mandatory for vehicles from 2017.

“This is being done for the interests of the citizens and the public,” Delhi’s chief secretary, K.K. Sharma, said in a meeting with reporters. “We expect the public to cooperate.”

Delhi’s most recent effort to regulate polluters – a ban on diesel vehicles older than 10 years old – descended into chaos earlier this year, with traffic jams at checkpoints and city officials arguing it was impossible to enforce.

“We must move toward reforms, but we have to be practical,” said Harsh Vardan, a doctor who is India’s minister of science and technology. “Also, don’t say something you can’t implement.”

The city’s smog, which is always bad in the winter, has been unusually thick in recent days, exacerbated by fireworks set off for the festival of lights, Diwali, on Nov. 11.

The air quality worsened sevenfold between October and November, according to a study by the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi, which showed that 3 percent of days in October had severe air quality but jumped to 73 percent of days in November.

“Clearly there has been a huge increase,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, the center’s executive director for research and advocacy and head of its air pollution and clean transportation program.”These levels are several times higher than the standard. This has serious health impacts.”

She said that the new plan would be a catalyst for drivers to begin thinking of alternative ways to commute – by car pooling, limiting trips or by foot or bicycle.

Delhi’s last significant push for cleaner air began in the late 1990s, when the government shuttered small polluting factories and switched all buses and auto-rickshaws from diesel to compressed natural gas. But the gains made after the switch began to erode around 2008, when the number of vehicles began to increase, Roychowdhury said.

The concept of limiting commuter travel via road-space rationing has been practiced in large cities in Latin America and elsewhere for more than two decades. In Beijing, for example, drivers cannot drive in the city center one day a week. London invokes “congestion pricing” – a surcharge on driving that is about $17.

But some environmental activists said implementation would be difficult in the sprawling capital, with 16 million residents and 2 million registered cars on the road. Although Delhi officials said Friday they would increase bus service and extend times for its Metro service, they are still about 10,000 buses short of demand, according to Amit Bhatt, a sustainable transportation expert in New Delhi.

“It will be very challenging,” said Bhatt, the head of transport at the World Resources Institute India’s EMBARQ program. When a system of alternative days was launched in Bogata, Colombia, he said, many just bought second cheap cars with a different license plate. Bogata eventually switched the odd-even number system to peak hours only, which has been more successful, Bhatt said.

Yet such moves do reduce the harmful particulate matter in the air, Bhatt said. For example, his group has co-created voluntary car-free days in New Delhi and Gurgaon, a suburb. Gurgaon now has voluntary “car-free” Tuesdays in four major corridors. During that time, the PM2.5 matter goes down 50 percent, Bhatt said.