Will Delhi be Habitable in the Future ?

Abstract

Most of the existing research in the theoretical and empirical understanding of environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is based on data from countries rather than cities. In contrast to these papers, the purpose of this particular paper was to investigate the pertinence of EKC in developing cities. The sample city considered for this paper is Delhi, the capital of India. The paper aimed at predicting the year in which EKC will reach its eventual peak. We also investigated if the peak of Delhi will be before or after the severest magnitude of Air Quality Index as per national standards. We specifically selected Delhi for the study taking into consideration several factors. India is one of the fastest-growing countries, and it is also important to understand how well cities are performing. From the time of industrialization, it is a known fact that generation and consumption of electricity does have negative externalities on the whole ecosystem. This motivated us to merge the pollution and electricity consumption of Delhi with the hypothesis of EKC. Further, our test included the prediction of the year when the average AQI of Delhi will cross this level. The economy is on the upswing and so are the pollution levels, but eventually, this will show an inverse relationship. The anticipation of the turning point will let the policymakers formulate a better policy for the betterment of the city. Various pieces of evidence were collected from several sources such as published articles from journals, WHO, World Bank, etc.