How Rekha Gupta failed PM Modi on Delhi’s toxic air

New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta has failed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and failed to protect her citizens from a severe health emergency in the form of toxic air quality.

Modi trusted her with the chief minister’s chair despite her lack of administrative experience. Instead of proving herself through actions, Gupta has chosen to express gratitude in every public remark, as though thankfulness could substitute for governance.

The solutions to clean the Yamuna were already documented. All she had to do was implement them, something her predecessor, Arvind Kejriwal, had failed to do.

People understand that it is not possible to fix Delhi’s air in the first year of a government. What bothers them is not the persistence of pollution but the absence of any vision, urgency, or credible roadmap.

So far, Gupta has merely repeated the Kejriwal playbook that achieved nothing, artificial rain, smog towers, and water sprinklers on roads. Each has been a waste of public resources and a showpiece for cameras.

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If her intent had been genuine, she would have focused on pollution at its source, the same way she approached the Yamuna clean-up by activating sewage treatment plants.

To give cleaner air to Delhi’s children and the elderly, including the prime minister himself, she needed to attack the sources of pollution one by one.

Traffic remains one of the largest contributors, yet the city has seen no visible attempt to ease congestion. Junctions and merging roads remain choked at peak hours every day.

There has been no effort to install smart signal timers or synchronised corridors to keep traffic moving. Instead, the traffic police continue to adjust lights in ways that increase challans rather than reduce idling emissions. At least Kejriwal’s government ran an “Engine switch off” awareness drive; Gupta’s has not even done that.

Public outreach on pollution and traffic rules is absent. The chief minister appears on camera more often than she appears in meetings with her officers. Her days are filled with speeches and photo-ops, not solutions.

If her intent were right, she would have taken on the National Highways Authority of India for collecting Rs 235 in toll each way at the newly inaugurated UER-II, which adds both cost and congestion. She would have worked with the Delhi Police to end unnecessary barricading that worsens traffic snarls and pollution.

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The biggest single factor turning Delhi’s air toxic each winter is stubble burning across the NCR. Anyone in the city can smell it in the evenings. Two neighbouring states, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, are ruled by the BJP, yet there has been no serious attempt by Gupta to persuade her counterparts to curb the burning.

Governments often say stubble burning is a state subject, but if the welfare of millions of citizens is at stake, a committed chief minister could push the Centre to make crop-residue burning illegal through national legislation. That would have set both Punjab and its farmers right.

Her inaction has left Delhi once again dependent on GRAP restrictions that choke economic activity and daily life. Long queues at entry points, sudden construction bans, and vehicle restrictions are not signs of policy; they are signs of failure.

As the opposition Congress said on Tuesday, and most Delhiites would agree, Rekha Gupta’s governance is about crisis management, not crisis avoidance.

She has not grasped the weight of the office she holds, the crown of thorns that comes with being the chief minister of India’s capital.

If she had, Delhi would have seen a leader in action, not another performer in front of cameras.