Sleep with your neighbor on odd days!! AC usage needs to be cut due to ozone depletion over Delhi.

I unfortunately get labeled in the set of people that are cynical, pessimistic and who don’t care about the environment and the problem of pollution facing citizens. Whatever is the case I must make my point about why I am not a big fan of the odd-even policy in Delhi.

However, before people pounce on me, here is the 10-point disclaimer:

1. I have been using the Orahi car pool app for about a year now. And trust me configuring rides is not very simple due to time and destination mismatches. Unlike Mr. Kejriwal not everyone has a set of colleagues living nearby and travelling to the same destination. I am amazed at the repeated announcements on radio of this over simplified car-pooling. I wish that like for Mr. Kejriwal there were colonies for private companies e.g. TCS colony, Deloitte Colony etc. that would make car-pooling a piece of cake.
2. Continuously following up with Shuttl for the past 6 months to suggest a relevant bus shuttle route for me in Gurgaon.
3. Used local rail to commute to office in Hyderabad. Always used airport shuttle bus (not cab) to and from Hyderabad airport (such buses don’t exist in Delhi, god knows why?).
4. Used local DTC buses during my school days.
5. When I visited Singapore, I didn’t hire a cab. Didn’t need to. The buses, metro, footpath, cycle paths are awesome and prioritized.
6. Never bought a diesel vehicle.
7. Used Myles to test drive the Mahindra electric vehicle (e2o) in NCR for one complete day. It’s awesome and doesn’t lack power.
8. Stopped using Delhi Metro when I could hardly get down (with just one luggage) at the New Delhi Railway Station even during so called off-peak hours.
9. No public transport goes to my wife’s office and she doesn’t operate in a SEZ setting where car-pooling could even be considered. She has to frequently commute at late hours.
10. I did contract sinusitis during my stay in NCR because of bad air.

I hope the above points do objectively communicate my willingness and pro-activeness to adopt public transport, that I am not in a comfort zone of driving around only in a car, and that I am also a victim of the bad air in NCR and would love a solution to the problem.

However, to me odd-even policy is extremely knee-jerk, looks more like gimmickry not backed by robust analysis, smells of autocracy, dumps what is state responsibility on citizens arbitrarily and is set in a control environment involving exemptions and school closures.

While I strongly believe that over analysis is sometimes the problem, it is not a great idea to first announce the plans and then give a thought to its modalities. I am not sure how great is the "agile" approach of "fail fast fail often" when applied to policy making.

Here are my ten questions for the Delhi government (not only the current government):

1. Why has it failed to provide last mile connectivity? Delhi’s metro feeder buses have never materialized after so many years of metro.
2. Why the roads / streets in Delhi are considered so unsafe, especially for women? Hyderabad / Ahmedabad are not so unsafe.
3. Why do autos not run by meter? Or go to places where you want them to go to? Mumbai doesn’t have this problem.
4. What has been done about the other heavyweight polluters like construction projects, diesel vehicles, burning of conventional fuels etc.? (By the way i am not in favor of knee-jerk, one fine day bans on diesel vehicles too without any warning to users / investors.)
5. What’s your promise to the citizens in return for asking compliance to the odd-even rule? What are your timelines for other initiatives?
6. Once the exemptions are removed, how do such people travel to offices that have no public transport connectivity?
7. Has someone analyzed the kind of adverse behaviors odd-even policy may generate and the actual impact it may have? Do you understand that a badly designed policy can be more problematic than the status quo?
• As per a NYT article, "Estimates of how much vehicles contribute to total levels of P.M. 2.5, particulate matter that is considered the most dangerous because it penetrates deep into the lungs, range from 20 to 40 percent in Delhi. Less than one-fifth of that comes from cars, according to a 2012 study."
8. Why was their no stakeholder management before announcement of the plan? What promise did you share with the citizens?
9. For the long term – When will the traffic from satellite towns like Gurgaon / Noida / Faridabad / Ghaziabad etc. stop using Delhi roads? 
10. When will you have “meaningful” footpaths not the current foot islands?

If odd-even is how the problems of environment are going to be tackled then soon there may be a dictat as to how one must use ACs on odd-even days based on your house number. Sleep with your neighbor on days you can’t run your AC. It will certainly help reduce Ozone depletion and also check electricity consumption.

And soon we may have ads showing Mr. Kejriwal in his pyjamas at his dear friend’s house demonstrating how it is feasible.