New Delhi, 12 December 2025 – The Consumer Choice Center (CCC) warns that the Delhi government’s sudden ban on coal and firewood tandoors across restaurants, dhabas, and street vendors risks harming small businesses while doing little to meaningfully improve the city’s air quality.
Despite worsening AQI (Air Quality Index) levels, the decision to force eateries to switch overnight to electric or gas alternatives focuses on the most visible and least powerful actors, rather than the biggest contributors to Delhi’s pollution, like household biomass burning, construction dust, and regional fires.
Shrey Madaan, Indian Policy Associate at the Consumer Choice Center, said:
This ban hits the people who can least afford it and does nothing to help with air quality. While families burn firewood at home because cleaner fuels are costly, restaurants are being punished for emissions that barely register in the city’s overall pollution load. It’s unfair, ineffective, and misguided.”
Restaurants and street vendors across the city report that the overnight mandate forces them to make costly kitchen changes, drop popular dishes, or risk losing customers due to altered flavours.
CCC argues that instead of symbolic bans, Delhi needs structural reforms that address the dominant pollution sources and make clean alternatives accessible.
The CCC urges the government to prioritise
- Strict dust-control enforcement at construction and roadwork sites, backed by real-time monitoring and penalties for non-compliance, addressing one of Delhi’s most persistent PM2.5 sources.
- Ending open garbage burning through audit-based compliance and strong action against violators.
- Allowing private mobility operators and EV fleets to expand, easing traffic congestion and reducing tailpipe emissions by improving transport options without restricting consumers.
- Targeted enforcement of existing legislation on high-emission industrial and commercial units, using transparent monitoring systems to ensure that the biggest contributors to pollution are held responsible.
policies that are proven to deliver meaningful gains without harming livelihoods.
Madaan concluded:
“Delhi needs solutions that work, not scapegoats. Banning tandoors won’t clear the air, but it will hurt thousands of small businesses and workers. Policymaking should focus on real sources of pollution and empower citizens with clean, affordable options, not impose blanket bans that do little for public health.”
