Air pollution: How Delhi can capitalise on China experience

New Delhi: There was immense excitement among the participants when Zeng Jinghai of Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection started making his presentation on how the Chinese capital fought air pollution, at CSE's conclave on clean air on Tuesday. Many from the audience wanted him to run through the slides again as they tried to find out what else Delhi had in common with Beijing other than implementing the odd-even scheme as an emergency response.

It turns out Beijing is controlling air pollution at multiple levels and the odd-even initiative is only a miniscule part of the strategy. Even during high pollution days, about 30% of the government vehicles are taken off roads besides implementing the odd-even rule.

Cai Jing, head of strategic planning at Beijing Transport Energy and Environment Center, said the city had already constructed four BRT corridors (61 km in total) and expanded bus lanes (355km). Besides, Beijing has successfully pushed the use of public transport by imposing differential parking rates-the highest fee applies to the inner city roads and the ground-level parking fee is higher than that of the underground parking.

Apart from the odd-even exercise, Beijing has a policy to restrict the use of private cars during peak hours once a week. This restriction is also based on licence plate numbers.

Beijing's pollution control measures started as early as 1998. Since then, it has been implementing three annual clean air action plans. According to Jinghai, more than 400 seriously polluting plants have been closed or relocated from Beijing, over 3 lakh bungalows converted their coal heating stoves to electro-heating utilities in the central urban area and more than 17,000 coal-burning boilers have been replaced by natural gas boilers.