Green Delusion: Scrap The Citizen
By Shivaji Sarkar
India has perfected a rare form of innovation: the ability to repeatedly convert economic assets into liabilities, wealth into waste, and citizens into offenders—without ever fixing the original problem. The vehicle scrapping regime unfolding across Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR) is not an environmental policy. It is a case study in administrative arrogance, policy laziness, and predatory governance masquerading as green virtue.
Delhi is a mere test case, preceding an all-India car scrap policy. It has shorn the concept of NCR into smithereens. The NCR has approximately 40 million (4 crore) vehicles. The Delhi territory has about a million cars. Of the 4 crore cars over 3 crore would be non-Euro 5, and the so called “end of life”, stipulated to be banished. Strangely enough the Supreme Court does not find fault in the junking of almost Rs 18 trillion worth of people’s wealth – the usable cars, in a region with terrible commuting system.
The metro hardly connects the NCR except suburbs in a linear way. Majority of the people having fine cars but “legally infirm” are having trouble in earning their livelihood as their movement is barred by Delhi government, which is less than one-fourth of the NCR. No country in the world junked its way to prosperity. India, however, appears determined to try.
The latest phase targets what the state euphemistically calls “end-of-life” ten-year-old vehicles. In Delhi alone, 62 lakh largely roadworthy, low-emission cars were slated for scrappage in July 2025 to feed a Rs 30-lakh-crore industry—a scale that should alarm any serious economy. Only a poor country with distorted priorities discards working capital so casually. Public protests forced a temporary pause, now revived under the familiar pretext of winter AQI panic. This is not environmentalism. It is economic vandalism.
Pollution a Pretext, Not a Problem
Delhi’s winter pollution is not a discovery of the 21st century. Foggy, smog-laden winters have been recorded since 1951, again in 1971, and consistently thereafter. The difference today is not pollution alone; it is how the state weaponises it.
Every winter, AQI numbers are brandished like emergency sirens, followed by police action against citizens. Cars are seized on roads. Entry points into Delhi turn into choke points. In one recent episode, 4,000 vehicles were denied entry in a single day, paralysing traffic, delaying wage earners, disrupting offices, and crippling industrial movement. The capital city is turned into a gridlocked punishment zone.
Citizens who bought vehicles on loans—often their single biggest household investment—are treated as environmental criminals. This, in a region that spans 25 districts across Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan, none of which has a remotely adequate public transport network. You cannot criminalise private mobility when the states all over has failed to provide public alternatives. What a shame! That is not regulation.
A Capital Region Without Transport
The NCR grew chaotically, encouraged by the same state that now feigns shock at congestion and emissions. Housing sprawled away from jobs, industries moved without rail links, bus fleets shrank, and last-mile transport was ignored. And yet, when pollution spikes—as it inevitably does in winter—the citizen is punished for filling the vacuum the state itself created. This is policy without empathy, driven by bureaucratic rigidity and coercive politics.
Jewar Airport: The Pollution Nobody Dares to Name
Every day, new pollution records are flagged in Noida and East Delhi. But there is a conspicuous silence on the elephant in the room: the poorly located Jewar airport. The massive construction frenzy around Jewar has turned a 300-kilometre belt—from East Delhi to Bulandshahr, Aligarh, and Mathura—into a high-particulate zone. Continuous earthmoving, unregulated industrial activity, concrete batching plants, and truck movement have transformed the region’s air quality.
Yet no authority has the courage to acknowledge this. It is easier to stop a middle-class commuter than to question a mega-project blessed by powerful interests. That’s rebranded as “development.”
Scrappage – a Tool of Coercion
The vehicle scrapping policy is being sold as climate action. In reality, it is a mechanism to force consumption. People are being nudged—often shoved—into buying new vehicles regardless of financial capacity. This suits automobile manufacturers, scrappage operators, and a volatile electric-vehicle lobby desperate for market capture. Today it is BS-IV. Tomorrow it is BS-VI. Already, there are whispers of pushing out Euro-3 vehicles barely five years old. This is a folly even the most developed nations refuse to commit. Germany, Japan, and the United States regulate emissions through testing, not age-based extermination of assets.
India, instead, chooses the crudest metric possible: age equals guilt. The message is clear—owning durable goods is risky in India. The state may arbitrarily decide tomorrow that your refrigerator, house, or tractor is “obsolete.” Such uncertainty kills capital formation, discourages savings, and entrenches poverty.
The Myth of the Green Economy
India loves boasting about trillion-dollar GDP milestones. Yet behind the propaganda lies a grim truth. Over 80 crore Indians depend on state food support. Per-capita income remains abysmally low—nearly twelve times lower than Japan’s, despite similar GDP headlines. India lags even behind Russia’s $2.4 -trillion economy in individual prosperity.
A country cannot scrap its way to higher incomes. Destroying household assets does not create wealth; it transfers it upward. Every forced scrappage is a silent tax on the middle and lower-middle classes, imposed without parliamentary debate or public consent. This is why India remains trapped in a vortex of low productivity and low trust. The state sees citizens not as wealth creators, but as compliance units.
A Policy Without Intelligence
Environmental policy requires nuance—targeting gross polluters, industrial emissions, construction dust, crop burning, and urban planning failures. What India has chosen instead is spectacle: roadblocks, seizures, panic, and chaos. Pollution is real. But so is policy failure.
Until India learns that governance is about building systems, not breaking assets, the cycle will continue. Every winter will bring the same drama, every year a new excuse, every decade a fresh policy disaster dressed up as reform.
India does not suffer from a lack of ideas. It suffers from an excess of bad ones—repeated endlessly, enforced brutally, and defended shamelessly. Scrapping vehicles is easy. Building a humane, rational, and intelligent state is harder. The Centre must step in and stop this inhuman, impractical exercise of forced scrappage, where cars are not regulated for emissions but segregated and junked to feed a predatory industry. — INFA