Delhi’s Cabinet approved a pollution-source monitoring project with IIT Delhi and the procurement of 30 electric mechanical road sweepers on September 29. PTI’s report that evening, carried by Rediff, cited a Chief Minister’s Office statement; The Statesman and Outlook separately reported the decisions taken at a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Rekha Gupta.
The sweeping programme is intended to extend mechanical cleaning to smaller roads. The government identified 854 roads across 250 municipal wards, covering about 609 kilometres with a right of way below 10 metres. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi would procure and operate the machines with a government grant. The projected programme cost is ₹393.73 crore over ten years.
The IIT Delhi collaboration is a separate five-year project estimated at ₹19.22 crore. It is intended to measure the contributions of sources such as traffic, road dust and biomass burning to PM2.5 and PM10 pollution throughout the day. Plans include restarting the Rouse Avenue monitoring site and a mobile laboratory, producing a dashboard and training pollution-control staff.
These are Cabinet authorisations for proposed work. The announcements did not provide evidence that the new sweepers had entered service or establish an achieved reduction in pollution. Procurement, operation and the usefulness of the resulting measurements remain the practical tests of the programme.