Nowhere to park this problem
Kejriwal has no excuse for not utilising the green fund
Delhi’s government has blamed everyone it possibly can for the air pollution crisis the city is witnessing this season (and which it does every year). It has pointed fingers at neighbouring states, the Centre, with which it shares responsibilities for running the city, and just
ourtake about anyone but itself. For a few weeks now, the question everyone has been asking of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is whether his government has done all it could have to prevent this annual crisis. The prevailing opinion was that it had not. This week, that opinion was reinforced by data. According to a RTI query filed by Delhi resident, Sanjeev Jain, the city government collected Rs 829 crore (till the beginning of November) from polluting trucks as green tax to combat air pollution but spent only Rs 93 lakh. In addition, another Rs 500 crore, which was collected as cess on every litre of diesel sold since 2008, is also lying unused. That’s Rs 1,329 crore! The government could have used this money to expand the city’s weak public transport structure by buying new buses that could have helped it reduce the number of vehicles on the road.
The number of buses in the fleet of the Delhi Transport Corp is at a seven-year low, so low that the AAP government could not have rolled out the odd-and-even arrangement at a day’s notice or move the excess load of two-wheeler riders onto the public transport. The government’s response to the information disclosed by its use (or lack of) of the green fund has been as vague as its pollution control plan. Initially it said that the reason it did not spend on buses was because it did not get land from the Union government to build depots. Then, perhaps realising the shallowness of this excuse, it announced it would use some of the “green tax” funds to buy 500 electric buses. If land is indeed a problem, then how will it now build depots for these e-buses?
This is not just a lack of planning; it’s the misuse of the mandate that the AAP government got in 2014 when it promised to make Delhi a world class city. We’re holding our breath.