India’s Supreme Court has given New Delhi three days to come up with a plan to clean up the air in a city ranked by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the most polluted in the world.
This is not the first time the court has passed such an order - successive local governments have failed to build roads to ease congestion.
About 52,000 commercial vehicles, excluding taxis, enter the landlocked city each day, more than double government estimates, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said in a report this week. Such vehicles account for about a third of the city’s pollution.
Hearing a plea filed by lawyer Harish Salve, the Supreme Court on Monday asked the federal government, Delhi’s local government and its municipal body to come up with a solution within three days.
The WHO last year said New Delhi had the worst air quality of 1,600 cities surveyed worldwide.
