What’s the Roadmap for Delhi’s Clean Future? In Fact, is There a Clean Future Ahead?

Cities, it could be said, are a passport for a country. You call it the city of mega greenery but the envelope of greens is perhaps finding massive competition from a constantly expanding commercial development. You call it a city decorated with bustling wide roads whose spaciousness complements that in people’s hearts. You call it a city marvelling on it’s emphatic, interesting historical monuments. But given a fair load of problems currently being faced, there are fears that the city may be walking on the path of becoming a monument of the past.

Just what is Delhi troubling with? How many problems are together taking a potshot at Delhi? At the outset, it may seem like a rhetorical question that’s been visited and re-visited in the past as also in the present. But one, whose answers, we all are in a desperate search of.

Truth be told, the current web of problems arresting the capital city is such that it may induce an examination of sorts to students. They may undergo an extensive test of sorts. For instance, teachers may be pushed to quiz students in an examination, asking them to write an ‘essay on the main problems being faced by Delhi’. At times, truthfully speaking, there are stinging concerns about Delhi’s state of pollution. So dense are problems lying in Delhi’s ebb particularly from the standpoint of it’s waning ecology and purity of air that it may just become advisable to all to be decked in facemasks at all times.

For starters, nobody needs an education or sorts to know that the current air we breathe in the national capital is detrimental on all grounds for the health of its denizens. This is the truth about Delhi. This is also the truth about the underlying regions in the vicinity- Faridabad, Noida and, Gurgaon. On top of that, while one of the major talking points about the capital city has been the state of pollution since 2016 onward, it doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence to note that according to the World Health Organization, the various classifications of the polluting matter are dangerously high.

When it comes to particulate matters, the following are the results:

And the chaos doesn’t quite end there. The PM 10 pollution level has been labelled as dangerous by the WHO. If you are a Delhi-ite, then this may not bring about a grin, at all.

The Pollution Index in the city is around 91.26. To top it up, the number of cars- ever burgeoning is somewhere in the upper echelons of 1 crore. Here is some statistic all need to care about but perhaps it doesn’t yet ring a bell. The number of cars that are in the city is about 1,05,67,712 until May 25. Of these, there are 31,72,842 registered cars in the city.

The last sample survey was conducted at a Pan-Delhi level as of last year and it seems the rate of car production and delivery on roads is only said to increase.

But if you did pay attention to the news carried out in papers then you might have seen that frequently, there’ve been problems such as a lack of supply of water in North India. Delhi, whose natural water supply hope courtesy of the Yamuna, a dilapidated mess in today’s times doesn’t have that luxury of consuming water from a natural river source.

But above all of this, there’s a lot of work cut out for the ruling government in the National Capital Region in addition to that of the Environment ministry Mr PK Tripathy, who served in the capacity of the former Chief Secretary of the Delhi National Capital Region, did attempt to direct some attention to the scale of the crisis.

In his words, “The need of the hour is in enlarging the reach of public transport and enhancing its present conditions. Public transport should be extremely efficient in order to restrain people from getting their private vehicles on road.” While it is commendable on the part of the administration that in building the Delhi Metro the state of affairs in public transport have undergone a sea change, there still remains a larger mess.

Owing to the presence of crawling traffic in different patches around the city, Delhi continues to move about at snail’s pace. Improving the infrastructure of the capital city, including the pedestrian traffic is also something that could be attended to. Delhi, therefore, needs to support not only the firmament of its youth and an enterprising lot that is busy in capturing different endeavours of life but also needs to take care of its elderly population in order to live true to the goal of a millennial city.

What’s of great importance, also, is the need of the hour, that of the city becoming carbon resilient.  The only point is, how well can the plans and ideas initiated be converted into a lasting reality?