Clean Air Action in Delhi-NCR: What next?

After years of battling air pollution, the time has come to assess what has worked, what has not, and what more is needed to clean the air of Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR). It took a pandemic induced lockdown to understand what it takes to witness a blue sky. But lockdowns are not the answer. For post-pandemic transformational changes, it is necessary to push durable long-term action. Two decades of battle has had its share of hits and misses with stabilization, worsening, and bending of the pollution curve. Delhi has done much more than other cities—closed coal power plants, stopped dirty fuels, scaled up industrial use of natural gas, put entire public transport and commercial fleets on natural gas, banned old vehicles, restricted truck entry, tightened control on construction, etc. Nonetheless the clean air benchmark is still nowhere in sight.