Environment Minister Gopal Rai on Wednesday said the Delhi government will implement the odd-even car rationing scheme after the Supreme Court reviews its effectiveness.

The top court on Tuesday questioned the effectiveness of the scheme, aimed at curbing vehicular pollution, and referred to it as “all optics.”  

Amid worsening air quality in the national capital, Mr Rai had earlier announced the flagship scheme, under which cars are allowed to operate on alternate days based on their odd or even number plates, would be enforced between November 13 and November 20.

Addressing a press conference, Mr Rai said the city government will submit two major studies conducted to ascertain the effectiveness of the scheme for the perusal of the Supreme Court.

“A call will be taken to implement the odd-even scheme only after the Supreme Court reviews its effectiveness and issues an order,” the minister said. 

The odd-even car rationing scheme, introduced in 2016, allows cars to operate on alternate days based on their odd or even number plates. The enforcement next week will mark the fourth time that the Delhi government has used this scheme to address pollution caused by vehicles. 

Iyad Shaqura, a doctor of pharmacy turned by war into an emergency physician, had become used to the flow of dead and wounded streaming into the hospital in Khan Yunis.

But on Monday evening, he fainted when he saw the bodies of his two children, his mother and his two brothers arrive at the emergency room.

His family had been killed by a strike that hit their home in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian territory is under heavy bombardment by Israel, which aims to destroy Hamas after the group’s bloody October 7 attack on southern Israel.

On Tuesday morning, his eyes filling with tears, Shaqura took a last look at his loved ones, draped in white shrouds and placed on the mortuary tables in the emergency room of Nasser Hospital, AFPTV footage showed.

Pointing at the bodies, one after the other, he listed their names: “My mother, Zeinab Abu Dayya, my brothers Mahmud and Hussein Shaqura, my sister Israa and her two children Nabil and Nur, and my two children, the apple of my eye, Abdelrahman, seven, and Omar, five”.

“I have five children, but he was my favourite,” said Shaqura, resting his forehead on the bloodied one of Abdelrahman.

His shroud and that of his brother were open at the face.

“What did they do to have tonnes of bombs and explosives dropped on their heads in their home?” he said, before adding with resignation, “God called them back to him like many other children before them”.

‘Triumph or be buried’ 

The most recent data published by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said that Israel’s bombing campaign had killed more than 10,300 people, including 4,237 children, since October 7.

The attack on southern Israel by Hamas, which triggered Israel’s retaliation, killed more than 1,400 people, according to Israeli officials, the majority civilians.

Shaqura is from a family of Palestinian refugees displaced from their land during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Such refugees and their descendants account for about 80 percent of the 2.4 million people living in the Gaza Strip, UN figures show.

“If the enemy wants to hunt us again, we will tell them that God has promised us one of two things: either to triumph in our liberated lands or to be buried there,” said Shaqura, adding, “Now, I will bury my children and return to work”.

He then led the ritual funeral prayer in the hospital courtyard, with his colleagues and relatives stood upright behind him while the bodies of his family were laid out on stretchers before him.

Their corpses were then taken to the “martyr’s cemetery” of Khan Yunis, nearby.

In the cortege walking to the cemetery, Shaqura carried in his arms Abdelrahman, whom he kissed one last time on the head.

New Delhi’s pollution levels continue to be in the severe category forcing authorities to impose emergency measures, including traffic curbs and shutting schools. The drastic air quality is a result of a cocktail of factors, the chief contributors being vehicular emissions and smoke from crop burning in neighbouring states.

NASA’s Worldview satellite has captured how the toxic smog extends from Pakistan to the Bay of Bengal. The smog is coupled with a sharp rise in farm fires in North India, shows the satellite data.

NASA data shows that the number of farm fires has seen a sharp rise since October 29. The state saw a 740 per cent increase on October 29 with 1,068 farm fire incidents – the highest in a single day in the current harvesting season.

With the air quality index as high as 500 in some areas on Wednesday morning, New Delhi has topped the chart of the world’s most polluted cities for the last six days. Stage 4 of the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP), a set of anti-pollution guidelines, has been invoked and diesel trucks and construction activities have been banned in the national capital.

The Supreme Court has asked the governments of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan to urgently discuss with the Centre how to stop the farm fires. The court has said it cannot allow this to become a political battle, stressing that the choking air quality is responsible for the “murder of people’s health”.