Greening will take priority over paving when streets across the National Capital Region are redeveloped, said Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) Friday at the third Clean Air Dialogue in the Capital.
“It is CAQM’s credo that street redevelopment as part of city action plans throughout NCR will mandate end-to-end paving or greening, with greening being the priority,” said Dr SD Attri, Member (Technical), CAQM during a session at the dialogue convened by the CAQM Resource Lab, a joint effort with the Raahgiri Foundation.
The session underscored that the region should stop plantation in isolation and manage its wetlands, forests, sanctuaries, streets and parks as a single ecological system in a shift away from simple afforestation towards systems-level restoration.
The dialogue brought together government agencies, urban planners, environmental experts, citizens and civil society organisations at the India International Centre Annexe. It was the third session in a year-round series designed to keep clean air on the agenda well beyond the winter months and to give citizens and civil society alongside policymakers.
The third iteration focused on blue-green infrastructure: the idea that landscape planning, when done at scale, can reduce air pollution and build urban resilience simultaneously.
“For decades, rapid urban development treated tree cutting as a default consequence of growth. Today, our perspective has fundamentally flipped: robust ecological infrastructure is our primary solution,” Deputy Inspector General Forests, Prashant Rajagopal said.
Shyam Sundar Kandpal, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Delhi Forest Department, said: “The forest department is distributing 10L free plants to plant in parks or private land. The Forest Survey of India has over the last 25 years measured green cover in Delhi, and it has increased from 8% to 25%.”
They also argued that a connected ecological network delivers benefits well beyond clean air. It improves thermal comfort and heat resilience, supports public health and biodiversity, and makes streets safer and easier to move through. The panel took up the everyday questions citizens raise most often, too: plantation management, tree cutting and pruning.
“When addressing urban emissions, we must recognize that expanding public transit is the only true long-term solution; no amount of new flyovers or underpasses will solve the underlying crisis,” Vijay Kumar Bidhuri, Secretary Environment & Urban Development, Chairman DPCC, Government of Delhi, said.
“Our planting policies needs to be viewed through a larger ecological lens that encompasses air, water, land, and natural resources. This means integrating ‘sponge cities’ or sites, creating connected open spaces, and developing mobility corridors or greenways,” Nidhi Madan, Director (Cities and Urban Landscape) of Raahgiri Foundation added.