Urban Environment
if Delhi wanted clean air, it had to strike at its biggest culprit – vehicular emissions.
Since then, study after study – from the Ministry of Earth Sciences, the Centre for Science and Environment, and TERI – has confirmed that vehicles are the single largest source of Delhi’s PM2.5, contributing between 41% and 51% of the city’s pollution.
Instead of tightening the rules on vehicular emissions, the new Delhi government is systematically dismantling them. It has quietly diluted the Supreme Court’s 2018 order to phase out Delhi’s dirtiest vehicles – diesels over 10 years and petrol cars over 15. This July, government suspended the ban on refuelling these polluting vehicles, citing citizens’ “emotional attachment” to their vehicles.
more recently the government has permitted the deregistered vehicles to get re-registered outside Delhi-NCR. The argument is that this will move the polluting vehicles to other states. It is an insult to reason.
The populist gimmicks – designed to please the electorate – have not stopped with rehabilitating old polluting vehicles. This year, both the Delhi government and the Union government pleaded before the Supreme Court not to protect citizens from poison in the air, but to secure the “right” to burst firecrackers. The ban was lifted.
Delhi’s crisis endures not for lack of solutions, but because of political deceit – leaders who pretend to act while letting the city choke.
by Ashish Khetan
12/11/2025
Over the decades, India has perfected a way of surviving catastrophe: the rich simply opt out. When healthcare fails, the rich build their own hospitals. When the water turns brown, we install filters at home and lay private pipelines. With every blistering summer, Delhi rebuilds itself as an archipelago of air-conditioned fortresses, each a small insurance policy against the failure of the collective. Health is purchased, education is corporatised, water comes in bottles, safety comes with private guards. The capital rebuilds itself as a mosaic of escapes — malls humming above drains of stagnant filth, gated colonies with apartheid-era segregated elevators glittering beside the slums that service them. https://thewire.in/rights/delhi-air-pollution-dissent-accountability
We live by subtraction — each family, each fortune, carving out a liveable island from a collapsing sea. A logic of separation, of purity and pollution that descends from the oldest grammar of the subcontinent, where the old taboo of caste eternally finds new technology.
To hold the government to account for our city, we must first have a conception of the city as ours — all of ours. That idea has been quietly dismantled, sold off square foot by square foot, as a depoliticised middle class and a repressed working class together produce what Delhi looks like today: a city choking in silence.
by Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla
10/11/2025
Entire sections of the highway were simply washed away by the swollen Beas, cutting Manali off from the rest of the country. The NHAI now speaks of tunnels and elevated structures as “long-term solutions”, but in the meantime the urgency is about pouring concrete back into the voids gouged by water and landslides. We fix the scar each time, but we do not change the reckless design that ensures the wound will reopen.
As India’s cities continue to grow rapidly, a staggering number of people find themselves living in growing informal settlements.
While the last comprehensive slum census conducted in 2011 showed 65 million people living in slums and other informal settlements, recent estimates suggest the number to be over 100 million, accounting for a quarter of India’s urban population.
A recent study highlighted that India has the world’s highest number of slum clusters in flood-prone areas. https://thewire.in/urban/as-flooding-wreaks-havoc-across-cities-a-nudge-for-urban-policy-to-address-climate-chang
These floods displaced thousands, damaged homes and disrupted the livelihoods of daily-wage workers and small-scale traders who depend on the informal economy. This is not an isolated situation. In Mumbai, the city’s coastal slums face frequent flooding and the growing threat of sea-level rise, disrupting life and livelihood.
The UNDRR Status Report 2020 gets straight to the point: India has a sturdy architecture of laws, policies and institutions on paper but such a scaffold fails at the implementation level. National to state to district level coordination is weak and piecemeal; overlaps in mandates prevail; and disaster management remains more reactive than preventive.
by Namesh Killemsetty, Deepanshu Mohan and Najam Us Saqib
15/09/2025
Mumbai News: Powai Residents To Form Human Chain Around Lake, Demand Action Against Water Hyacinth And Sewage Dumping https://www.freepressjournal.in/mumbai/mumbai-news-powai-residents-to-form-human-chain-around-lake-demand-action-against-water-hyacinth-and-sewage-dumping On Monday, The Free Press Journal had reported that the BMC has removed around 1,450 metric tonnes of hyacinth using fine harvest machines from the lake in a cleanup drive started from May 23. However, the residents have alleged that the removal of the weed will not effectively solve the entire issue as the weed will keep coming back due to untreated sewage water being dumped in the lake.
A silent "Save Powai Lake" human chain scheduled for Sunday called off as BMS has demanded an event fee of Rs. 11,00 for the protest... http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/121699129.cms
Toxic PoP waste lying around Powai lake for over two years https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toxic-pop-waste-lying-around-powai-lake-for-over-two-years/articleshow/121390360.cms More than 60 tonnes of PoP (Plaster of Paris) “harmful” waste has been lying along the circumference of Powai lake, and it has not been removed for more than two years, a city environmental group, Vanashakti, has pointed out.People associated with the group expressed the feeling that the authorities may have forgotten about the mounds of waste which is harming the water body besides polluting the water, This has been brought to the attention of the senior BMC officials for urgent action, said members of the environmental group.
Vijay Singh / Mumbai Mirror / May 25, 2025
A Road To Nowhere https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM0ypDSp81I INTACH Pune Chapter Apr 15, 2016
With increasing urbanization, often short term solutions are provided without thought to long term effects. The Pune Municipal Corporation planned and constructed a road on Mutha river bed under the garb of providing alternative to already congested Sinhgad road. This is a story of the river, the road and the struggle to ensure safety of citizens.