The Supreme Court’s latest rebuke of a government body over hazardous air pollution in Delhi is warranted, given the persistently tardy response to the crisis. On Tuesday, it pulled up the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) for its lack of seriousness in tackling this perennial problem and gave it two weeks to identify the major sources of pollution and outline long-term action plans to address each of them. It is a damning indictment of official inaction that, even after two decades of judicial intervention, the apex court finds little to show by way of durable outcomes.
This reflects an administrative failure to acknowledge the gravity of the problem. That is why measures to curb pollution—such as the odd-even traffic rationing scheme in the past or cloud seeding more recently—have appeared half-hearted. Recent episodes only reinforce this impression: the detention of citizens at a rare protest at India Gate last month, negligence at pollution-monitoring stations, dubious sensors allegedly generating fudged data, and even the court’s own decision to relax a blanket ban to allow green crackers all betray inconsistency and drift.
The Delhi government has claimed that 2025 saw the city record its cleanest air in eight years due to targeted interventions. While air quality did improve last year—the first eight months were the cleanest in eight years barring the lockdown year of 2020—this was largely due to frequent monsoon rains. More tellingly, Delhi recorded its third-worst December in a decade. In other words, there has been no meaningful improvement during the peak pollution months from October to December. In this context, quibbling over marginal differences in source attribution amounts to a public disservice.
Data Dilemma
The court’s directions to the CAQM are therefore timely and necessary. Noting differences among institutions and experts on source apportionment, it has asked the commission to work with domain specialists and arrive at a uniform identification of major contributors, with a report placed in the public domain. Elected representatives across the National Capital Region (NCR) have instead indulged in blame games rather than pursue long-term solutions. Delhi, for instance, has frequently pointed to stubble burning in neighbouring states, even as the Chief Justice of India has cautioned against politicising this seasonal practice. Multiple studies have identified vehicular emissions as a dominant contributor, alongside year-round sources such as construction and road dust, and biomass burning in industries and households.
Moving Beyond Seasonal Reaction
This is not the first time the Supreme Court has taken the CAQM to task—for infrequent meetings, a lackadaisical approach and apparent reluctance to act against errant officials. Even the emergency restrictions triggered under the Graded Response Action Plan once air quality breaches critical thresholds are widely viewed as reactive. It is high time the commission got its act together. Pollution is not Delhi’s problem alone, nor is the city’s air quality dictated solely by local factors. A 2025 study by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that nearly two-thirds of Delhi’s pollution originated in other NCR cities. A coordinated, multi-state response is therefore urgent. Depoliticising the issue and arriving at consensus on root causes is only the first step towards acknowledging the scale of the crisis. Delhi-NCR can draw lessons from Beijing, once considered the world’s smog capital, which managed a turnaround through aggressive measures—shutting polluting industries, switching to cleaner energy, and investing heavily in public transport and electric mobility.