Delhi’s early smog plan: Will clean air follow?

Delhi has prepared for winter pollution before winter arrives. But timing alone cannot solve a problem whose sources extend far beyond the capital’s borders

Delhi has, for once, announced its winter pollution plan before the smog arrives. The 2026-27 action plan bans dust-generating construction from November 1 to January 31, with a complete halt between December 10 and January 20. Parking fees at authorised sites will double until February 28, though Metro-run car parks are exempt. Offices will move to staggered hours, with half their staff working from home. The ‘No PUC, No Fuel’ rule will be enforced from October 1, with number-plate cameras at 500 petrol pumps. Another 150 electric buses will join the fleet, while non-local commercial vehicles that fail to meet BS-VI norms will be barred. The most substantive part concerns industry. Of 2,354 targeted units, 2,197 have installed online emission monitors, 57 defaulters have been shut down, and the particulate limit will be tightened from 80 to 50 milligrams per cubic metre from October 1. The NCR’s monitoring stations will increase from 85 to 157, and 334 enforcement teams will patrol in two shifts. This is what enforcement should look like.

Yet much of the plan is the Graded Response Action Plan made pre-emptive. The novelty is timing, not substance — and GRAP has habitually arrived late: of 17 invocations between January 2025 and January 2026, 13 came only after air quality had crossed the threshold. Parking fees and work-from-home orders, meanwhile, are blunt tools that shift the burden onto commuters. Stubble burning is the familiar villain, and the trend is encouraging. By November 9 last year, Punjab had recorded 35 per cent fewer fire events than in 2024, while Haryana had recorded 65 per cent fewer. The Centre has spent over Rs 3,120 crore on crop-residue machinery since 2018-19, and the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) has now ordered the complete elimination of stubble burning in 2026. But floods that delayed harvesting helped drive that decline, so it may not be repeated, and averages conceal spikes: farm fires supplied 48 per cent of Delhi’s PM2.5 on a single day in 2021, though their average share in October-December 2025 was only 3.5 per cent. Even the Centre now calls farm fires an ‘episodic event’ rather than the core problem. December delivers the sharper lesson.

With farm fires having faded, slow winds and a stable atmosphere still forced the city into GRAP’s harshest stages. In early December, Delhi’s own sources supplied only about 35 per cent of its PM2.5; the rest drifted in from the wider NCR. Within the city, vehicles account for roughly half of local emissions, a fact that parking fees and 150 buses do not address.

So will the plan work? It should blunt the worst peaks, chiefly by curbing dust and industrial emissions, but it will not deliver clean air. That demands what Delhi cannot legislate alone: an airshed strategy with enforceable targets for Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, a decisive shift from private vehicles to public transport, and CAQM directions that are obeyed, not merely issued. Early action is a virtue. The test comes on November 1, when curbs must arrive before the smog, not after it.