After the Delhi high court flagged the need to relieve the Delhi gas chamber and called for an action plan, the Delhi government led by Arvind Kejriwal declared the odd-even rule as a unique policy solution to the problem. The vehicle restriction was stated to be planned for fifteen days to permit a study of its impact, it was announced.

Lately though, after the Delhi high court inquired if one week was not enough, several media bites and reviews of the Environment Pollution Control Authority have listed benefits accrued as a consequence. Those highlighted include improvement in government bus ridership, Metro riders, accelerated applications for CNG conversion and the exhumation of Delhi’s old functioning circular rail system. Of the primary target, precious little evidence is available to justify the policy. We need not, of course, be surprised. Such is the bane of policy formulation in our country that the Delhi government has also faithfully followed this non-scientific approach to policy making in such an important aspect of our daily lives.

When the Kejriwal government came to power, they promised an end to corruption in governance. This does mean at first glance, ridding us of small time bribery for routine services offered by government entities. This would be readily appreciated and the numerous voices would please the ruling group. However, the fundamental problem of corruption is perhaps the issue of transparency in policy and decision making, which alternately could be described as science-based policy making. Many of us, not only intellectuals, thought that this would lead to some basic change in approach that could be emulated across the country and bring grounded politicians and bureaucrats together in rational policy analysis and formulation. Now it appears that no such attempt was even considered and the gas chamber challenge is a prime example.

We might ask, where are the facts and figures that led to this inevitable conclusion for the odd-even formula? We might also inquire in the present case, how much information or statistics are required to arrive at a decision on the contribution of any activity to the final result? Delhi’s gas and particulate accumulation is the result of a large number of activities: coal and oil-based power plants near the capital, commercial vehicles running on diesel, commercial vehicles running on petrol, four wheelers of both kinds, two-wheelers, construction dust from within and near the capital, burning of crops, etc within Delhi and in nearby states, the ability within Delhi to absorb some of these emissions, and critically, the patterns of weather and climate variability in Delhi and the region that could
aggravate or abate pollution levels.

A good beginning was made in the study by the IIT, Kanpur. However, any assessment of relative impacts needs a conditional demand analysis and an assessment of significance of the interacting parameters involved. A large time series is therefore needed for arriving at any convincing conclusion. When this author had engaged in a study of water consumption in a small US county during his research, the conditional demand analysis required data across several seasons to enable some definiteness in conclusions and to persuade the voting public that these measures made sense and they should conform. Matters get even more complicated in the case of rainfall and weather patterns. The policy results, as negotiated between various vested interests, would then lead to a set of policy actions and not experimental sallies of the kind now in force in Delhi. Therefore, the high court was right in asking if the experiment could not be terminated in one week but it seems to have manifestly erred in not asking for the basis for the policy and inquiring into its whimsy.

To make matters worse, the Delhi government also gave a number of exemptions. Given the lack of transparency in the decision process and the clear lack of scientific inputs to the policy decision, the charge that exemptions given to women, two-wheelers and autorickshaws were with an eye to the next election, as hypothesised by James Buchanan, cannot be refuted with any credibility. It, therefore, appears unfortunate that a government elected with such a massive mandate for breakthrough leadership has failed to provide responsible governance in this case.