The Supreme Court’s ordering of sweeping measures to control pollution levels in Delhi, including banning registration of new diesel SUVs and high-end vehicles with engines of more than 2000 cc capacity in Delhi until March 31, 2016, barring goods vehicles not bound for Delhi from entering the capital, doubling of the ‘green cess’ on commercial vehicles entering the capital and barring entry into Delhi of all commercial vehicles more than 10 years old, may demonstrate the seriousness of the concern felt by the apex court over the alarming levels of pollution in the national capital, but raises troubling questions of judicial overreach. Yes, the issue of rising air pollution in the National Capital Region is alarming and urgent measures are needed to address the problem. But what these measures should be, and in what manner they should be implemented, surely fall within the realm of the executive. While citizens have every right to knock on the Court’s door if they feel the executive is failing to discharge its responsibilities in any manner, the Court can, at best, nudge the executive to act. It should not lay down a specific course of action.

In the instant case, it is not as if the executive was not seized of the matter. The Delhi government had come up with a number of measures, including the introduction of an odd-even rule to reduce the number of cars on the road, increasing the capacity of the public transport system to encourage people to shift away from private transport, and starting a programme of vacuum-cleaning roads instead of simply sweeping them, to address one of the biggest causes of pollution in the NCR — dust. It was also working with the Centre, and bodies concerned directly with pollution, such as the National Pollution Control Board, to work out effective measures. This is quite a different scenario from the one prevailing in 1998, when the SC ordered compulsory conversion of all public transport vehicles to run on compressed natural gas. That the gains from this were later lost due to dieselisation of the private vehicle segment was due to a policy skew which subsidised diesel at the expense of petrol.

There is also the question of whether these measures adequately address the problem, or even if they are implementable. First, the exclusive focus on diesel vehicles may lead one to believe they are the biggest polluters, whereas the reality is that the two-wheelers of NCR are bigger polluters. Here, other factors, including construction dust, and open burning of waste, particularly agricultural waste in neighbouring States, is as much a problem. One cannot simply bar entry to trucks passing through, without creating by-passes they can use. The focus should be on developing sustainable solutions, which include policy measures to discourage some kinds of behaviour and encourage others. Simply issuing fiats is not enough.