Begin by fixing system and clean air will follow: Kiran Bedi pitches five reforms for pollution fight

New Delhi: Former IPS officer and former Puducherry Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi on Wednesday called for basic but major institutional reforms to tackle India's air pollution, saying the crisis "won't respond to half-measures" and requires institutions with "authority, clarity and staying power".

In a blog titled "Five Reforms India Needs for Clean Air", Bedi said the country must move from firefighting to systemic change.

"Fix the system and the air will follow. India deserves institutions strong enough to deliver the most basic public good: breathable air," Bedi said.

She said the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) needs "leadership with real authority".

Bedi said that the commission is led by a retired official who, while experienced, lack the administrative leverage and political heft essential to move ministries and influence budgets.

She wrote that "a serving secretary-level officer can coordinate across states, bargain with chief secretaries and push execution at the speed the crisis requires".

Bedi urged integration of CAQM into the Environment Ministry, saying the body currently operates beside the ministry rather than within it.

"To have impact, it must become MoEFCC's operational engine, working daily with agriculture, power, transport, industry and urban development," she wrote, and added that clean air must be "a core function of governance, not a peripheral report-writing body".

She also proposed creation of a five-year "Clean Air Mission Fund" to provide stable, multi-year financing for monitoring networks, enforcement teams, district clean-air cells, scientific modelling and public-health communication.

"Stable financing is what turns vision into outcomes," Bedi wrote.

On enforcement, she said a regulator needs its own team and asked that the CAQM build its own enforcement wing.

"A regulator without its own inspectorate is a regulator in name only," she wrote, noting the commission currently depends on overstretched state agencies and should have a district-level force empowered to inspect, penalise and shut down violators.

Bedi called for a "National Council of Environment Ministers", chaired by MoEFCC, to align standards, coordinate fuel and transport reforms, manage cross-border pollution and ensure shared accountability across states.

She also urged a stronger digital backbone, proposing a "National Clean Air Data Centre" that is AI-enabled, real-time and integrating industrial, vehicular, agricultural, meteorological and satellite data" to enable predictive governance rather than reactive responses.

Delhi-NCR grapples with high air pollution year-round and the problem worsens in winter when unfavourable meteorological conditions, combined with increasing vehicular emissions, paddy-straw burning, firecrackers and other local pollution sources, make the air quality hazardous.

Delhi is equally a victim of its own pollution generated year round.

On December 1, the Supreme Court directed the central government and CAQM to revisit their action plan for tackling air pollution in the Delhi-NCR region.

The court stressed that air pollution cannot be viewed as a seasonal or short-term problem and asked the government to evaluate whether the measures taken so far have been "effective, ineffective or only partially effective".

Experts, environmental groups and petitioners have long argued that the Centre's air pollution control plan called GRAP and other emergency curbs cannot substitute for a long-term structural plan that addresses the underlying causes of Delhi's chronic pollution.