Air, water, land: New BJP govt in Delhi faces three-fold pollution test

After the euphoria begins the work. The BJP, basking in the aftermath of a historic triumph in Delhi, now has its task cut out. India’s national capital is besieged with problems that are unique to the city, not just in their magnitude, but also in their consequences.

In its 2025 Delhi Assembly election manifesto, the BJP promised to improve the capital city’s air quality, clean the Yamuna River and tackle the problem of waste landfills. The three between them have made India’s national capital an extremely hazardous place to live in.

While the BJP manifesto looks promising and the government-elect has highlighted many priorities, like turning Delhi into a “world-class city” and beautifying the Yamuna waterfront, such promises may miss the wood for the trees if inadequate attention is paid to the most serious of obstacles — the capital’s environment.

A gas chamber

Last year, Delhi’s air quality was poor or worse for a total of 155 days. In November 2024, some parts of the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) turned into a gas chamber, with the air quality index (AQI) crossing 700!

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An article published in The Lancet Planetary Health in July 2024 claimed that about 7.2 per cent of all deaths in India were attributable to particulate matter (PM) 2.5 concentrations higher than 15 micrograms per cubic metre of air recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to Dr Amit Ranjan, Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the authors of the Lancet article applied a time-series analysis to 10 cities in India — Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Shimla, and Varanasi — between 2008 and 2019.

“The study observed that the total number of deaths connected to air pollution every year in the 10 polluted Indian cities was 33,267. Among them, Delhi topped the list, with 11,964 deaths connected to air pollution,” observed Ranjan.

The BJP’s 2025 election manifesto promised to launch “Delhi Clean Air Mission” to halve the city’s average AQI by 2030 and reduce the number of days with poor AQI. It also assured reduction of PM2.5 and PM10 levels by 50 per cent, in addition to deploying additional road sweeping and water sprinkling machines in highly polluted areas.

BJP’s Yamuna plan

The BJP will also have to demonstrate that cleaning the Yamuna of malignant filth is more than just political sparring with the AAP. Despite many measures promised and some executed, the river in Delhi epitomises pollution. In the run-up to the elections, the AAP and the BJP traded charges on the quality of water in Yamuna River, the deadline of its competition moved back and forth between Arvind Kejriwal and Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena.

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The BJP’s election manifesto has a plan: it wants to develop the Yamuna riverfront, along the lines of the Sabarmati riverfront in Gujarat. It also talked about setting up a Yamuna Kosh (fund) to revitalise the river. Under this, wastewaters from the capital’s three major drains will be fully treated before they flow into the river. The sewage treatment plant capacity will be expanded to 1,000 million gallons per day and common effluent treatment plant capacity to 220 million litres per day, ensuring zero industrial emissions into the Yamuna.

Pile of waste

Waste management is the third major roadblock. On an average, the capital generates over 11,000 tonnes of solid wastes per day, but its waste processing plants have a capacity intake of only a little over 8,000 tonnes. The non-processed waste ends up at landfill sites. Just how bad the situation is can be gauged from the fact that one of the major landfill sites at Ghazipur in east Delhi was in 2019 measured at 65 metres, merely eight metres short of the Qutub Minar!

The BJP has promised to increase treatment capacity to eliminate the garbage mountains at Ghazipur, Okhla and Bhalswa, and to put a stop to the formation of garbage mountains, enhancing waste collection capacity in the city.

On paper, the promises look assuring, but as ever, no policy can really succeed if people do not participate. Civic behaviour such as throwing garbage anywhere, unplanned and unregulated construction works is something that the new government will have to reckon with, as the one preceding it did.

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Need for funds

Politically, a “double-engine” government should make governance easier and smoother, in addition to getting substantial funds needed to build efficient infrastructures.

And funds would certainly be required. According to one calculation, the subsidy bill of Delhi under the AAP government has shot up more than 600 per cent over the past 10 years. It surged about 607 per cent to Rs 10,995.34 crore in the current financial year from Rs 1,554.72 crore in 2014-15, when Delhi was under a year-long President’s rule.

The statistics gain significance as Delhi is projected to slip into a revenue deficit by the end of 2025-26, for the first time in three decades. Of course, Arvind Kejriwal has always argued that subsidies are mandatory, given the difficult situation common people find themselves in and there is an important school of policy analysts that is willing to back this thesis.

The subsidy argument

Without going into the pros and cons of this debate, it has made the BJP’s job arduous. The incoming BJP government in Delhi will need to find over Rs 13,000 crore to fund its subsidies, if it has to make good poll promises. This sum is over and above the Rs 11,000 crore that the government spends on electricity and other welfare programmes, which the BJP has promised to continue. Along with BJP promises, the subsidy bill will go up to nearly 30 per cent of the city’s budget.

The bulk of the money is expected to go towards the scheme promising women from lower-income households a monthly transfer of Rs 2,500, along the lines of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh where the BJP is the ruling party or part of the alliance in power. With 3.8 million women eligible for the benefit in Delhi, this scheme can cost the exchequer Rs 11,400 crore.

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So, until Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns from his foreign trip in a couple of days, the BJP has but a short time to celebrate before the affairs of the national capital consumes its time and energy.