Delhi’s winter, fought on a calendar: We stopped waiting for the smog to arrive

Every October, Delhi stages the same play. The sky turns grey and the city awaits the AQI to exceed 300 for the initiation of the emergency rulebook. Cranes go still. Parents check their phones to see if school is cancelled. February is when we exhale and March is when we forget.

When I took charge in February 2025, what bothered me most was not how bad the air was, but how late we always reacted. Don’t treat smog like a fire to be extinguished; smog is a season, which happens on the same dates each year. You do not wait for the monsoon to start before you clean the drains. Governance must match that calendar.

So this winter, the rules no longer wait for the alarm. From 1 November, half of office staff work from home, Government offices run on staggered hours, parking charges double, and non-BS-VI vehicles from outside Delhi are not allowed in. Previously, these waited till the air became harmful. Dust-raising construction stops from 1 November to 31 January, and from 10 December to 20 January, when the air is stillest, all construction halts.

I know the cost. A builder loses weeks, a daily-wage worker loses days, and I have sat across from both. But last December, PM2.5 averaged 210 micrograms, nearly 30 per cent worse than October and November, after the farm-fire season had ended.

I know the cost. A builder loses weeks, a daily-wage worker loses days, and I have sat across from both. But last December, PM2.5 averaged 210 micrograms, nearly 30 per cent worse than October and November, after the farm-fire season had ended.

Where we are pushing hardest is in vehicles. The CAG found that over 1,00,000 vehicles in Delhi got certified, even though they may have not met the emission standards, some of them in less than a minute. Today, 500 fuel pumps use number-plate cameras, and if your PUC is invalid or your vehicle is past its legal age, you do not get fuel. And with 5,088 electric buses, Delhi now runs the largest electric bus fleet in the country, ahead of London’s 3,000 and Santiago’s 4,000.

On 1 October, Chief Minister Rekha Gupta opened Delhi’s Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) at Shastri Park. Her intent was clear: Delhi had never had a centre devoted only to pollution, and clean air, so closely tied to the health of our families and the future of our children, cannot be a winter-only effort. AI cameras watch about 700 large construction sites and alert the owner and the department when dust rises. GPS trackers are used for sweepers and body cameras are worn by inspectors, ensuring a visit is proven, not just recorded. On 13 October we switched on 13 new monitoring stations, taking Delhi from 47 to 60, one in every five-kilometre square.

Pollution in Delhi isn’t merely a big cloud. It is ten thousand small ones: a broken road in Patparganj where every truck lifts a curtain of dust, buses idling outside Anand Vihar ISBT, a guard burning plastic at two in the morning because he is cold. The past 10 years have seen these being ignored by the previous government for policies that looked good in the photograph. Odd-even made headlines every winter, and a smog tower went up in Connaught Place. Optics cannot fix this. So district teams now inspect a three-kilometre radius around every hotspot and guards are getting heaters.

The groundwork shows. Ninety-eight mechanical sweepers now work in two shifts, up from 86 last winter. Over 1,193 kilometres of roads have been rebuilt. The landfills, which had only grown taller, are finally shrinking.

So do the results. In 2025, Delhi’s average AQI fell to 201 from 209, PM2.5 dropped from 104 to 96 micrograms, and severe-air days halved from 17 to 8. It was our cleanest non-lockdown year since at least 2018. Between January and September 2026, Delhi breathed air below AQI 200 on 194 days, a week more than last year.

Air does not stop at Singhu or Ghazipur, nor does our work. This winter’s plan was finalised in a joint review with Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, and the revised GRAP binds the whole NCR to one rulebook.

It will make a difference on the street: a swept road with no dust, a guard who doesn’t have to light a fire, a bus that doesn’t leave a trail of smoke. My promise to every family in this city is fewer severe days, and a government that stays on the ground, ward by ward, all winter long.

Delhi has been coughing all these winters with excuses. This one, we meet the smog head-on, before it arrives.

The author is a Minister of Environment, Government of NCT of Delhi; Views presented are personal.