NEW DELHI: Conceding that its two-decade-long intervention to tackle air pollution in Delhi-NCR had failed to achieve desired results, Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) to identify all major sources of pollution in two weeks and suggest long-term sectoral action plans to tackle each of them in a phased manner.A bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi attributed the failure to loosen the grip of pollution over Delhi-NCR to the court heeding myriad and divergent individual suggestions of experts. It said that “we have many expert opinions before us which apportion 12%-41% of the pollution load to vehicular emissions”.”This does not mean we will become experts and give knee-jerk orders like transition of all vehicles to electric. That’ll cause chaos. Why can’t the expert statutory body like CAQM bring all domain experts under one roof, hold deliberations and come out with long-term solutions, which would be implemented in phased manner so as not to hurt livelihoods, industry and the public,” the bench said.
Additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati’s request for two-month time to CAQM for this purpose drew sharp a reaction from the bench, which chastised it for being non-serious in tackling the perennial problem of severe levels of AQI in Delhi-NCR. “We’ll give two weeks to CAQM,” it said and sought the action plan by Jan 21. The bench said it had on Dec 17 asked CAQM to revisit its earlier long-term remedial measures but the authority, instead of filing a concrete action plan, has filed a status note.The CAQM’s status report, the court said, is “unfortunately silent on several issues flagged by the court during the last hearing”.The bench also asked CAQM to consider the issue relating to toll plazas separately uninfluenced by the stand taken by the MCD, Gurgaon civic body and NHAI.
