‘Agencies not yet ready to apply Grap measures’

NEWDELHI: As pollution continues to worsen in Delhi, the Supreme Court-appointed Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (EPCA) has warned that “stricter measures” including the odd-even road rationing may have to be introduced any time.

But even a year after their first experience with the Graded Response Action Plan (Grap), agencies remain unprepared to implement measures, especially those related to the city’s public transport, experts said.

Going by the plan, municipal corporations should have already increased parking fees by ‘three-four times’ across the city as air quality has remained in the ‘very poor’ category (AQI 301-400) for more than a week. Similarly, the government also has to augment bus and Metro services.

While Metro said it has added 82 trips, there has been no change in the parking rates or increase in number of buses.

ODD-EVEN

Last year, government agencies went into frenzy when EPCA directed them to roll out the oddeven scheme. This scheme comes into effect once the city’s AQI crosses ‘emergency’ category (more than AQI 501) for 48 hours.

Faced with a depleting fleet, the government had to hire private buses to meet the demand.

Officials said Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) had found it difficult to convince transporters. “During the two odd-even drives in 2016 also, we had taken buses from schools. But passengers had defaced the buses,” an official said.

The transport department said if the need arises, it is “equipped to hire buses”.

“If the odd-even scheme has to be rolled out in a day, then I doubt the government would be able to provide seamless transport. Forget last-mile or feeder services, even long distance bus journeys continue to be unreliable in Delhi,” said S Gangopadhyay, former director, Central Road Research Institute (CRRI).

PARKING

Even as pollution levels plummet, agencies said they haven’t yet discussed the possibility of increasing parking rates. “As and when we get any direction, we will implement a hike in parking fees. It only needs an executive order to be passed, which takes a day to be passed on to parking contractors,” said Madhup Vyas, commissioner, North Delhi Municipal Corporation.

On November 9 last year, a spurt in pollution levels had prompted the lieutenant governor to direct the MCDS to increase parking fees four-fold. The hike was withdrawn after four days.

“It is extremely disappointing to see that the Delhi government has been toying with the parking policy for over a year now,” said Sunita Narain, EPCA member.