Exclusive: Govt’s ‘solutions’ don’t match its claims on Delhi’s air

New Delhi: Delhi is back in “very poor” air, again. On October 26, 2025, the city’s air quality index (AQI) crossed 320 in several parts of the capital, triggering Stage II restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) and fresh warnings that even healthy adults may face breathing stress if this persists.

Authorities have already started talking about steps like artificial rain through cloud seeding to temporarily bring down particulate levels.

If you listen to the messaging, it sounds like everyone is trying. But if you look at the actual policy choices the Centre and governments around Delhi have made going into this pollution season, a harder picture emerges.

The steps that would lower emissions at source are either priced out of reach, kicked down the road, or converted into PR. The steps that are loud, visual, and short-term, toll raids on trucks, water-spraying convoys, cloud seeding, are the ones pushed in public.

Combining three pressure points that directly affect how toxic Delhi’s air gets in winter: traffic inside the city, smoke that blows in from crop residue burning in Punjab, and “emergency action” once AQI turns hazardous. In each case, the stated intent from the government and the actual implementation are pulling in opposite directions.

1. The new bypass that was supposed to take vehicles (and emissions) out of Delhi is being priced so high that daily users won’t use it

In August 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated two flagship road projects in Delhi: the Delhi section of the Dwarka Expressway and key stretches of the Urban Extension Road-II (UER-II). These projects were pitched as pollution relief for the capital.

The message from the Prime Minister’s stage and the Union road ministry was that these corridors would “decongest” Delhi, reduce traffic jams on choke points like Dhaula Kuan, Mukarba Chowk, the Ring Roads and NH-48, and cut the number of vehicles that crawl through the centre of the city just to get from one edge of NCR to the other.

Officials claimed congestion could drop by as much as 50 percent once long-distance and cross-city traffic shifted to these new links.

Slow, stop-and-go traffic is a major winter pollutant in Delhi. Transport is regularly cited as contributing close to one-fifth of the city’s PM2.5 load.

But look at how the government actually set up public access to this “relief road.”

On UER-II, which is the new high-speed arc linking the Gurugram / airport side of NCR to the northwest (Rohini, Bawana, Mundka, Sonipat side) without entering central Delhi, private cars are being asked to pay around Rs 235 one way and Rs 350 for a same-day return. For heavy and commercial vehicles, the notified slabs go much higher, going into four-figure tolls for a single trip and more for a 24-hour return.

Residents along the Mundka-Bakkarwala toll plaza, which sits on this corridor inside Delhi territory, have protested for weeks, calling the fee structure “exorbitant” and “punishing.” Their argument is that this is not an inter-state highway far from the city.

This is now a functional ring road for daily NCR movement, including farmers and workers who travel between Najafgarh, Dwarka, Bahadurgarh and Rohini. They are being told to buy monthly passes or pay every single day inside their own urban zone.

For a normal commuter, say, someone doing Gurugram side to Rohini side to avoid Dhaula Kuan, or someone moving from southwest Delhi up to northwest Delhi without crossing the core, that toll is not a one-off. It is a daily tax. Many will simply not shift.

This has a direct pollution consequence. The government’s stated promise was: “We are giving you a road to pull vehicles (and emissions) out of central Delhi.”

The actual pricing tells those same vehicles: “Use it only if you can afford premium expressway rates inside your own city.”

What that means in practice is that large parts of NCR’s daily private traffic, cabs and service vehicles will stay on the old, overloaded stretches inside Delhi, exactly where pollution is already worst in winter, instead of moving to the bypass that was advertised as the fix.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), which falls under Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari, controls this toll regime. So the contradiction sits at the Union level, not at some distant municipal committee.

2. The Centre and the states still treat Punjab’s stubble burning as a talking point, not a solved issue, and the numbers that claim “success” are themselves in question

Each year, Delhi’s winter pollution story is framed as: “Stubble smoke is blowing in from Punjab.”

When farmers in Punjab burn paddy residue after harvest, especially under north-westerly winds, that smoke travels into Delhi. In this October window, the pattern was visible again.

Punjab has been telling the country that stubble-burning incidents have “massively reduced.” Officials have used figures that say reported farm fire “cases” fell by about 70 percent from 2023 to 2024. But a closer look at Punjab’s own remote-sensing data shows something important: while the number of “fire incidents” on paper dropped sharply (from over 36,000 in 2023 to just over 10,000 in 2024), the total paddy area that was burned did not fall in proportion. In fact, the burnt area slightly went up, from 19.14 lakh hectares to 19.17 lakh hectares.

It suggests the counting method is being managed.

Here is how it works. Earlier, almost every hotspot flagged by satellites during harvest was counted as a stubble-burning incident. Now, Punjab says it “verifies” each alert on the ground and discards those it considers false or old.

On top of that, there have been periods where satellite feeds feeding Punjab’s system temporarily went dark, which led to stretches in which almost no new “fires” were added to the official tally even though harvesting was still underway. The state then uses that cleaned, narrower number, not necessarily the total burnt area, to claim big success.

Delhi points to Punjab and says, “Your smoke is killing us.” Punjab points back and says, “We’ve already cut burning.” The Centre publicly scolds Punjab, but stops short of establishing a permanent, centrally funded buyback/disposal network for crop residue at the scale required to make burning economically pointless for the farmer. Instead, it allows this to remain a seasonal shouting match.

The outcome is that Delhi’s AQI still jumps into “very poor” the moment Punjab’s burning surges, and people in Delhi-NCR continue to inhale that mix of farm smoke and local emissions every October.

3. Once the air turns toxic, the government moves fast, but mostly on optics

The moment AQI crosses 300, the administration swings into emergency mode. GRAP stages are imposed. Construction restrictions tighten. Diesel generators are curbed. Water-spraying trucks are sent out. Officials talk about “special measures.”

This year, Delhi has also leaned on artificial rain. Cloud seeding, essentially attempting to force rain from existing clouds to wash particulates out of the air, has been showcased as a pollution response. Authorities have said they are prepared to attempt seeding again if the conditions are right.

Cloud seeding photographs well. It lets governments say, “We are literally making rain for your lungs.” But it does not stop the emissions that create the toxic load in the first place. It is dependent on the weather, not governance. It is, by design, a band-aid.

The same is true of last-minute traffic restrictions, odd-even announcements, and televised “sprinkler” trucks. These are all tactical, short-span, high-visibility moves that arrive only once the air is already dangerous.

None of them fix the fact that, structurally, the city is still forcing millions of vehicles through the same bottlenecks every day because the alternative road has been priced like an elite corridor. None of them fix the fact that farm smoke is still entering Delhi whenever Punjab cuts and clears paddy.