Delhi’s push to demonstrate that great retail streets can function without private cars has hinged on two showcases: Ajmal Khan Road in Karol Bagh and the Red Fort-Fatehpuri axis of Shahjahanabad. Both were unveiled with promises of cleaner air, thriving commerce and a replicable template for Indian cities; both quickly delivered eye-catching gains before slowly slipping back toward the very congestion they were meant to cure.
Revisiting the projects in mid-2025 — armed with the city’s own air-quality data, court filings, press reports and fresh field notes — reveals a nuanced story of early success, gradual decay and, crucially, the structural tweaks that could still rescue them.
Ajmal Khan Road, pedestrianised in May 2019, entered the record books as North Delhi Municipal Corporation’s first Urban Mobility India award-winner for non-motorised transport, a laurel that briefly put the locality on par with global “walking streets”.
Within weeks, a spot study on the newly car-free stretch by Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment measured roadside fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) levels roughly a quarter lower than on the parallel traffic-choked Arya Samaj Road, with peak spikes falling by more than 40 per cent. Footfall doubled, benches were crowded and traders spoke of a carnival atmosphere.
A companion mobility survey submitted to the Urban Mobility India jury underlined why the concept looked irresistible — just four per cent of visitors arrived in cars, yet those vehicles had been swallowing a third of the street space.
Fast-forward to 2025 and the same benches sit largely unused on ordinary weekdays because shopowners’ SUVs occupy half the carriageway, bollards have been dragged aside, broken slats litter the footpath and police enforcement is intermittent. Two on-site visits — one on a Monday pathri or local informal market day and one during regular trading hours — confirm that pedestrians return the moment cars disappear; the Monday market is crowded, lively and free of parked vehicles, whereas the weekday scene is gridlocked and desolate.
Traders who depend on kerbside access blame the partial ban for lost revenue, complaining that the promised multistorey car park is still unfinished and, in 45 degrees Celsius heat, an uninviting five- to ten-minute walk from their shopfronts.
In short, Ajmal Khan’s physical makeover arrived before a workable parking-management regime, heat-mitigation measures, or incentives to keep traders onside, so the street quickly slid back to its pre-project equilibrium.
The Red Fort-Fatehpuri corridor in Chandni Chowk, opened in September 2021 after a Rs 100-crore overhaul that buried overhead cables and laid twelve-metre granite promenades, tells a slower but equally sobering story. Heritage facades emerged, the granite pavements drew weekend crowds and capped rickshaw permits kept motor vehicles at bay for almost two years.
When the facility-management contract expired in September 2024, no agency picked up the sweeping, security, or repairs. Cracked tiles went unrepaired, litter piled up, boom barriers were left unmanned and unlicensed rickshaws crept back. The issue is less parking pressure than a yawning operations-and-maintenance gap aggravated by fragmented custodianship among Shahjahanabad Redevelopment Corporation, Public Works Department (PWD), Municipal Corporation of Delhi and two police departments.
Field observations echo the pleadings: Litter heaps, cracked granite and two-wheelers slipping through unmanned checkpoints. Yet the same reconnaissance finds that four-wheelers remain scarce — restrictive bollards, clear parking near the Metro station and the corridor’s tourist magnetism still dissuade most motorists. Maintenance, not parking, is the Achilles’ heel here.
Taken together, Delhi’s flagship pedestrian corridors have frayed for reasons far deeper than the oft-cited “trader resistance”. There are intertwined engineering, fiscal and governance gaps that have steadily eroded the ambition — and yet, precisely because these gaps are fixable, the city needs more such corridors, not fewer, to reach its clean-air targets.
One-shot construction budgets. More than Rs 100 crore in Chandni Chowk and Rs 160 crore in Karol Bagh were poured into repaving, lighting and street furniture, but not a single rupee was earmarked for the recurring costs of sweeping, security, lighting or surface repairs. Capital expenditure and operational expenditure both need to be sufficiently funded for any system to function.
Splintered ownership. PWD handles construction; the Municipal Corporation is supposed to clean; the Shahjahanabad Redevelopment Corporation plans heritage works; Delhi Police maintains law and order; traffic police controls entry. With five agencies and no lead custodian, every lapse becomes “someone else’s job”.
Labour-intensive policing in a megacity that needs automation. Seventy-five home-guard volunteers posted to Chandni Chowk in December 2024 rotate every few hours, leaving predictable windows when two-wheelers slip through.
Climate and load stress. Open paving heats to 55 °C in summer, then cracks under monsoon runoff. The same heat drives shoppers back into air-conditioned cars, shrinking the political base for car-free rules.
Missing complements. At Ajmal Khan Road, the multistorey car park is still a five- to ten-minute, sun-baked walk away; promised electric shuttles vanished once fines disappeared. Traders therefore view kerb parking as their only viable option and have the leverage to reopen the street.
Yet the differences in these two case studies are instructive. Ajmal Khan unravelled rapidly because off-street parking lagged and a concentrated traders’ lobby could demand kerbside access. Chandni Chowk, blessed with metro connectivity and heritage footfall, has held its vehicle-free status longer but is bleeding from poor upkeep rather than parking pressure.
The original gains, however, remain proof that Delhi’s approach can work. Ajmal Khan’s air-quality dip and Chandni Chowk’s momentary surge in pedestrian comfort are real, measurable achievements.
Delhi still has time to rescue its two flagship corridors; doing so will require shifting the conversation from “Who built the nicest roads?” to “Who keeps the street clean, safe, shady and enforcement-tight every single day?”
Under the National Clean Air Programme, the capital must cut particulate pollution 40 per cent below 2017 levels by 2026. Yet the Centre for Science and Environment’s latest analysis places Delhi’s 2024 annual PM 2.5 average at roughly 105 micrograms per cubic metre — over twice the national standard and climbing for a second straight year.
Each winter, the Commission for Air Quality Management rolls out emergency bans, but those quick-fix curbs buy only a few days of relief. Well-managed pedestrian districts, by contrast, deliver permanent roadside reductions, temper the urban-heat island and offer commuters a visible alternative to private cars.
The moral of Ajmal Khan and Chandni Chowk is not that pedestrianisation failed — it thrived until maintenance money, clear governance and climate comfort were withdrawn. Delhi tried to run a sophisticated clean-air intervention on the business model of a one-time beautification scheme.
Rescuing the two flagships — and scaling the idea far beyond them — means moving from monument thinking to systems thinking. Every rupee that lays new paving must be matched by paise set aside for daily upkeep, raised through a small surcharge on shop licences or by pricing the kerb in real time. Enforcement must shift from rotating constables to cameras and e-permits that make a parking fine as certain as sunrise.
A single street-management authority, ideally under the district magistrate with its own budget and a monthly dashboard of cleanliness, safety and user-satisfaction scores, must replace the current patchwork of mandates. Climate comfort — continuous shade, mist fans, drinking fountains, night-time freight windows and clearly demarcated vending bays — has to be built in so that the hawkers, loaders and shoppers who spend the longest hours outdoors see it as a blessing, not a burden.
Embedding these rules in the forthcoming National Urban Transport Policy refresh could save the next generation of Indian pedestrian corridors from repeating a costly cycle of build, boast — and backslide — and would remind sceptics that walkable streets, properly maintained and fairly policed, still deliver cleaner air, safer passage and livelier commerce.
Unless Delhi scales these fixes citywide, it will keep seesawing between celebratory ribbon-cuttings and emergency GRAP alerts — never quite delivering the clean air its 33 million residents and India’s flagship air-quality programme, urgently require.
This article is part of our series on how India moves, which looks at the relationship between air quality and human mobility in cities and towns.