Cleaning Delhi's Air: Implementation Action Plan

Using the IIT Kanpur’s Comprehensive Study on Air Pollution and Green House Gases (GHGs) in Delhi as its basis, this Action Plan suggests measures to control pollution from five major sources of air pollution in Delhi—emissions from coal-fired power plants, vehicular emissions, burning of crop residue, emissions from ready-mix concrete batching plants and dust at construction sites.1 Although the Central Pollution Control Board has already drawn up a Graded Response Action Plan (‘Graded Action Plan'), its main thrust remains the stringent enforcement of existing standards/rules/bans.2 In this Action Plan, we attempt to go beyond the routine recommendation to strengthen monitoring and compliance and identify a range of actions—legislative, executive, policy, financial—that are needed to give effect to the many solutions that have already been proposed to combat Delhi’s air quality crisis.