Delhi draws battle plan for winter smog
Winter has not yet arrived in Delhi, but the city’s air already has an appointment book. Lieutenant Governor Taranjit Singh Sandhu and Chief Minister Rekha Gupta sat down on Wednesday with a map of 47 pollution hotspots, 13 senior officers, and a demand that has failed the city every year for a decade: make this winter different.
The high-level review, attended by ministers Ashish Sood, Manjinder Sirsa and Pankaj Kumar Singh, along with the Chief Secretary, the MCD Commissioner, the CEO of Delhi Jal Board and heads of PWD, DDA, transport and environment departments, focused on the sources that choke the capital every year without fail: dust from roads and construction sites, vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions and open burning.
Metro construction dust emerged as an early flashpoint, with the Chief Minister and the Environment Minister flagging it as a major concern. Officials explained that bitumen-based road repair had been delayed for months because of supply disruptions linked to the situation in West Asia, which had made bitumen scarce. With supplies now normalising, repair work on both bitumen and cement concrete roads is being pushed to finish as soon as possible.
The LG and Chief Minister directed the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation to immediately act on dust generated at its construction sites, and told road-owning agencies to focus first on stretches where residents are actually complaining, backed by daily monitoring of mechanised sweeping, water sprinkling, pothole repair and road restoration under the existing pothole SOP.
On vehicular pollution, Delhi Traffic Police has been asked to conduct a fresh survey of the city’s 62 known traffic choke points and flag them to PWD, MCD or DDA for fixes. Officials were told to cut congestion and vehicle idling through better signal timing, removing encroachments, improving junctions, managing parking and responding faster to breakdowns and accidents.
One detail stood out starkly in the discussion: on several stretches across the city, unauthorised parking by cars, autorickshaws and e-rickshaws is eating up 60 percent of the road’s usable width, turning ordinary traffic into a slow-moving cloud of exhaust. Officials were directed to intensify anti-encroachment drives specifically at these locations.
The meeting also pushed for a faster shift toward electric vehicles across two-wheelers, three-wheelers and both light and heavy motor vehicles, with directions to rapidly expand EV charging infrastructure across the city.
On industrial pollution, the message to the Delhi Pollution Control Committee was blunt: compliance must show up in actual reduced emissions, not just paperwork. Officials were told to verify that installed Air Pollution Control Devices and Continuous Emission Monitoring Systems are genuinely working, take swift action against repeat violators, and submit weekly reports on which industries are complying and which are not.
At the heart of the plan sits the 47 hotspot strategy, a 3x3 km zone drawn around each pollution-heavy pocket across all 13 districts, now assigned to 13 senior officers at the rank of Additional Chief Secretary, Principal Secretary or Secretary, each personally responsible for their zone.
To keep the pressure from fading once winter fog rolls in and headlines move elsewhere, the LG directed the Environment Secretary to submit a fortnightly, quantifiable progress report in tabular form, routed through the Chief Secretary to both the Chief Minister’s and Lieutenant Governor’s offices, an attempt to ensure this review does not become just another meeting Delhi’s residents will have to breathe through.
