‘NO CAR SUNDAY’ ORGANISED IN CP, PEOPLE URGED TO DITCH PVT VEHICLES

NEW DELHI: Scores of Delhiites, including youngsters, gathered in Connaught Place on Sunday morning, cycling and walking, with a message for people to ditch their private vehicles for a day.

The campaign called, ‘No Car Sunday’, which was first started by a group of teenage environment activists as a local initiative to discourage neighbours from using their cars for one day of the week to help reduce vehicular emissions in the national capital, has now become a multicity campaign that was organised on Sunday in Mumbai, Bangalore and Lucknow.

The initiative is now being backed by Fridays for Future (India chapter), Let Me Breathe, Vrikshit Foundation, My Right to Breathe and Extinction Rebellion (India).

Sixteen-year-old Aditya Dubey, who was among the youngsters who started this campaign, said that this was initiated to encourage public participation to send out the message that every citizen of the country can contribute to making the environment cleaner for the coming generations.

“I am an asthmatic myself and I know how difficult it is hundreds like me in Delhi to just exercise our basic right to breathe. Things only get worse for us during the winters. We all know the contribution of vehicular emissions to the rising pollution in the country and our small contribution can go a long way in reducing that,” said Dubey.

Participants stood with posters reading, “clean air everyday’, ‘this is my space to walk’, and ‘reclaiming my right to breathe’. They cycled and used the Yulu bikes from central Delhi’s Shivaji Stadium metro station as a symbolic gesture to reclaim the streets for cyclists and walkers.

Bhavreen Kandhari, environmental activist, who is also backing this campaign, said, “We are planning to increase the ambit of this campaign and want that the government should also take interest and get involved in this initiative that has been taken up by children of this city. Today, when we took the campaign to the streets we saw a great appreciation and acceptance to this concept.”