New Delhi yesterday wrapped up a controversial trial of driving restrictions that took about a million cars off its roads, with arguments still raging about whether it is the right approach to cutting smog in the world’s most polluted capital.
The 15-day experiment, which started on Jan. 1, allowed private cars on the roads only on every alternate day and slapped violators with a fine of 2,000 rupees (US$30) in a bid to reduce air pollution.
It took more than a third of the city’s nearly 3 million private cars off the roads, visibly lessening the traffic on usually clogged routes.
Photo: AFP
In a city where road rules are routinely flouted, most drivers appeared to be obeying the restrictions and many said that they viewed the scheme positively.
“Commuting wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be,” said marketing executive Akshath Matharu, who has been taking the metro to work every other day. “Look at the roads, they’re so thinly populated. Who could have imagined free-flowing traffic in Delhi?”
A 2014 WHO survey of more than 1,600 cities ranked Delhi as the most polluted, partly because of the 8.5 million vehicles on its roads, with 1,400 more added every day.
The dramatic curbs were announced by Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in December as part of a wider anti-pollution drive that also includes shutting some coal-fired power plants and vacuuming roads to reduce dust.
The Delhi government said the trial resulted in a “more than 50 percent drop in air pollution primarily caused by vehicular traffic” and that the measures could be enforced again after a meeting on Monday.
However, India’s state-run System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research showed levels of harmful PM 2.5 particles hovering between “very poor” and “severe” between Jan. 1 and yesterday — well above the WHO safe limit of 25.
Environmentalists attributed the persistent smog to low winds and a fall in daytime temperatures.
A number of challengers approached courts during the trial ban arguing it was inconveniencing residents and saying the city’s public transport system was not up to the task.
However, India’s Supreme Court, whose top judge backed the car-rationing plan at the outset, disagreed with petitioners.
“People are dying due to pollution and you are challenging it for publicity,” a bench of justices AK Sikri and R Banumathi said on Thursday.
The top court’s judges added that they had been car-pooling to improve the city’s filthy air, which claims up to 30,000 lives each year, according to the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema