After years of fining restaurants for using coal and firewood under strict anti-pollution rules, Delhi-NCR's air quality commission quietly lifted all restrictions — because there's no LPG left to cook with anyway.
In what may be India's most efficient policy reversal, the Commission for Air Quality Management revoked all GRAP restrictions in Delhi-NCR, including the carefully enforced bans on coal and firewood use in tandoors and kitchens. For years, the government had progressively tightened these rules — fining restaurants up to ₹5,000 for coal tandoors, shutting down eateries that used firewood, and lecturing the nation about clean cooking under the Ujjwala scheme. Then the Strait of Hormuz choked, LPG imports collapsed, and the same government that spent half a decade evangelizing gas connections found itself in the awkward position of saying "actually, burn whatever you can find." Meanwhile, Karnataka's forest minister had to warn against illegal tree-felling as firewood demand spiked. The clean cooking transition, which took a decade and billions in subsidies to build, unraveled in approximately three weeks.