Delhi Elections Over, New Government Has A Mountain To Climb On Environment

(MENAFN- Live Mint) The BJP is hardly unaware that after their historic triumph in Delhi, they have a mountain to climb to tackle the environmental black hole that Delhi has become.

When a new BJP government takes office, improving the capital city's air quality, cleaning the Yamuna River, and tackling the problem of mountainous waste landfills will be top-of-the-mind obstacles.

“Our new government will certainly act. We are aware of the magnitude of the problem and Prime Minister Modi has himself given the clarion call for change. We are committed (sic),” says Satish Upadhya, Vice Chairman of the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and a former president of the Delhi BJP.

Upadhya says the BJP poll manifesto for the first 100 days is clear on what needs to be done.

The big challenge for the new government is that many things have already been attempted. Earlier governments have closed coal power plants, stopped dirty fuels, scaled up industrial use of natural gas, put entire public transport and commercial fleets on natural gas, banned old vehicles, restricted truck entry, tightened control on construction, etc. Yet clean air continues to elude.

In a study entitled Capital Gains, Clean Air Action in Delhi-NCR: What Next, the Centre for Science and Environment noted that the last few years have witnessed the generation of more robust scientific information on air pollution, the maturing of several actions initiated over the past decades, and the opening of new policy opportunities to enable the attention this public health crisis deserves.

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