Delhi's Green Week: Yamuna Cleanup Funds Released, Metro Trees Planted, But Smog Season Looms

The Delhi government released Rs 340 crore from the Yamuna Action Plan III budget on Tuesday, pushing the total disbursed this financial year past the Rs 1,200 crore mark — a figure the AAP administration is presenting as proof that Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's river-revival pledge is moving beyond sloganeering. The money is earmarked for 13 new sewage treatment plants, four of them on the eastern bank between Shahdara and Kondli, where untreated drain outflows have long made the river's oxygen levels flatline every monsoon.

The timing matters. Delhi is about six weeks from the October-November window when stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana combines with the city's own vehicle and industrial emissions to push the Air Quality Index past 400 — the 'severe' threshold. Anything governments want to show as environmental progress needs to be announced, photographed and filed with the National Green Tribunal before that seasonal catastrophe arrives and dominates every headline. The NGT's principal bench, sitting at Bhagwan Dass Road, has three pending contempt notices against the Delhi Jal Board over missed STP deadlines, and officials are anxious to show forward motion.

Metro Corridors and the Tree-Planting Controversy

Delhi Metro Rail Corporation reported on Wednesday that its Phase 4 construction crews have planted 11,400 saplings along the Janakpuri West to RK Ashram Marg corridor since January — a compensation figure required under the Environment Impact Assessment clearance granted in 2024. Critics from the Delhi Tree SOS network counter that fewer than 3,000 of those saplings have survival-verification tags, and that the stretch through Punjabi Bagh and Rajouri Garden saw at least 640 mature trees felled during foundation work in the March-April dry season. DMRC has not publicly disputed the felling number.

Separately, the South Delhi Municipal Corporation launched a pilot on July 1 under its Green Canopy Initiative, converting three traffic medians on Aurobindo Marg between IIT Delhi and AIIMS into low-maintenance native-species gardens — Arjuna, Neem and Peepal — replacing ornamental grass that required daily watering. The corporation says the switch cuts irrigation water use on those medians by roughly 60 percent. The pilot is modest: 1.2 kilometres of road frontage. But urban ecologists at the Centre for Science and Environment in Jorbagh have been pushing this model for five years, and its formal adoption by even one civic body is a shift in practice.

Numbers Behind the Headlines

Delhi's own economic survey data, released in February, put the city's per-capita green space at 2.1 square metres — against the World Health Organization's recommended 9 square metres per person. That gap has barely moved in a decade. The Central Pollution Control Board's June 2026 monthly bulletin recorded an average PM2.5 concentration of 48 micrograms per cubic metre across Delhi's 40 monitoring stations during June, which sounds manageable until you note that the safe annual average under Indian standards is 40 — and June is the cleanest month the city gets.

The Pradhan Mantri Electric Bus Scheme added 150 buses to Delhi's DTC fleet in June, bringing the electric total to 1,940 out of roughly 7,200 buses — about 27 percent. The central government wants that share at 40 percent by March 2027. At the current procurement rate, that deadline looks tight.

What comes next is largely bureaucratic. The NGT hearing on Yamuna compliance is scheduled for July 17 at Bhagwan Dass Road; the Delhi Pollution Control Committee is expected to issue its pre-winter action plan by August 15, setting emission norms for brick kilns and stone crushers in the National Capital Region. Residents in areas like Anand Vihar and Wazirpur — both ranked among the city's worst micro-zones for particulate pollution — would do well to track both those dates. The policy decisions made in the next six weeks will determine whether this winter's air is merely bad or catastrophic.