With a World Health Organisation survey ranking Delhi the most polluted among 1,600 cities in the world, there’s little wonder that the Delhi government is trying hard to get rid of this dubious distinction. What are the odds that the Delhi government’s odd-even rule will work in evening out the pressure of vehicular traffic on Delhi’s roads?

The rule is nothing but a form of non-price rationing, with its ability to impact human behaviour. Specifically, such rationing has the ability to spur people onto behaviour governed by loss aversion. As pointed out in the Nobel Prize winning work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, people tend to interpret outcomes as gains and losses, relative to a reference point. Further, people are more sensitive to losses than to commensurate gains.

The moot point is whether the reference point for the affected citizen is clean air (and hence health costs) or easily accessible and convenient alternative modes of travel and the associated time costs.

Ordinary commuters would weigh the anticipated loss from the move to restrict private vehicles as also the time costs associated with such a move to be greater than the anticipated gain of cleaner air. Further, the commuter would assign greater values to the immediate loss than to the gains available at a later point in time.

Alternative routes As Dilip Soman in his book, ‘ The Last Mile: Creating Social and Economic Value from Behavioural Insights ’, notes, “The high rate of failure of new products has to do with the fact that the developers did not spend any time thinking about the last mile. In short, they failed to recognise the proactive effort that would be required by consumers to adopt and use the new product.”

Can the Delhi government work out alternative routes to success in reducing pollution, as also easing traffic congestion by ensuring greater adoption? Out-of the box initiatives would need to be devised to nudge the rule-resistant average Delhi commuter to see merit in the ‘Clean Air’ initiative.

The government may nudge organisations in the Delhi-NCR region to take pro-active measures to reduce the proportion of private vehicles used by employees.

This may include efforts to encourage a weekly ‘work-out-of-home’ initiative, to those involving ‘reduce the number of vehicles in your parking lot on a weekly basis’. Organisations, which put out their targets to help in the government initiative, may get their employees, especially the private vehicle owning management group, to own these targets and chase the same, without compromising on productivity.

Social norms Organisations may also use the power of appropriate default-setting effectively, through manipulating the ‘opt out’ versus ‘opt in’ default options. They may arrange for public transport for staff with the default option being ‘in’. With senior bureaucrats and top management leading by example, such a move signals ‘social norms’.

Equally importantly, the government, in order to sustain such behaviour, would need to facilitate the adoption of public transport.

This would include strengthening the mass transport system, as also last mile connectivity. Thus, for facilitating public transit, the problem of getting from the home/office to the public transit station would need to be resolved.

The writer teaches at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai. The views are personal

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