Written by: Vikram Chopra
5 min readNov 27, 2025 07:36 AM IST
First published on: Nov 25, 2025 at 11:14 AM IST
I run an autotech company in India. My livelihood comes from people buying and driving cars. Mobility is the backbone of my business. Yet here I am, publicly asking the government to restrict cars, restrict diesel, restrict anything that pumps poison into the sky. When someone like me starts arguing for fewer cars on the road, you should understand how desperate things have become.
I am not writing this as a CEO. I am writing this as a father and a son. I have a five-year-old who should be playing outdoors but instead asks why the sky looks dirty again. I have 80-year-old parents who hesitate to step outside because the air stings their throats. This is not a theory. This is not politics. This is my family’s lungs on the line. And the truth is painful to say out loud: Delhi is suffocating because it refuses to do anything that makes daily life slightly uncomfortable.
We already know what cleans Delhi’s air because we have tested the solutions. Odd–even rule in January 2016 cut PM2.5 by roughly 14–16 per cent as per reports. We saw it work in real time but instead of refining or scaling it, we scrapped it because people found it annoying.
In 2020, the lockdown revealed the full truth. When traffic, construction and industrial activity stopped, PM2.5 and PM10 didn’t just fall. They crashed by 40–60 per cent. NO2 levels dropped sharply. The AQI at many NCR hotspots shifted from mostly “poor” pre-lockdown to “good” or “satisfactory” during lockdown.
Every winter since, the same pattern repeats. Every time GRAP restrictions, construction halts, diesel limits and older vehicle bans actually kick in, the AQI often starts to ease. And every time they’re relaxed early, the pollution spikes right back. Anyone pretending this is a complex mystery is just looking for an excuse to avoid doing the obvious.
What makes me angry is that Delhi has also ignored every proven global intervention that could have prevented this annual disaster. Congestion pricing could have reduced peak traffic. Seasonal diesel restrictions could have stopped winter from becoming a mass respiratory event. Real-time emissions monitoring at construction sites would have forced compliance instead of letting violators treat fines as pocket change. Satellite-linked payments could have given farmers a real reason to stop burning stubble. A functioning public transport system could have made owning a car a lifestyle choice instead of a survival requirement.
None of these ideas are new. What they require is courage and that is exactly what we lack.
This city behaves as if clean air and comfort can coexist. They cannot. Not with the way we consume, drive, build and burn. Delhi wants to breathe clean air without giving up a single convenience. That entitlement is the real pollutant. The weather is not doing this to us. We are doing this to ourselves.
And this is where I stop being polite. If restricting cars helps, restrict them. If diesel needs to disappear for four months, do it. If odd-even works, bring it back. If construction sites violate norms, shut them down that day, not after a dozen warnings. If any industry is a chronic offender, regulate it like a health emergency instead of negotiating with it like a fragile stakeholder.
People can get angry at me for saying this. But I would rather have people angry at me than have my child living with an air purifier for the rest of his life. My son and my parents do not get replacement lungs when Delhi fails to act. Neither do yours. That’s the part nobody wants to confront. If Delhi keeps choosing comfort over action, then we should admit the truth: We are choosing poisoned air over responsibility. We are choosing to cough, wheeze and age faster because doing the right thing is annoying. And in a decade, when the city is living inside sealed rooms with air purifiers strapped to every surface, we will pretend we didn’t see this coming.
Delhi does not need awareness, it needs discipline. We need a government that’s willing to be disliked for the right reasons and citizens willing to be disrupted before the city becomes unlivable for everyone we love.
I am done whispering this. Delhi is choking and we are running out of breath to debate it.
The writer is founder and CEO, Cars24
This city behaves as if clean air and comfort can coexist. They cannot. Not with the way we consume, drive, build and burn. 
Share
