India is home to 22 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world – largely because their streets are jam-packed with vehicles. And the car market is still growing significantly. Let's turn back the clock to understand how Indian cities ended up full of cars, and meet the people working to find a way to unclog them.

Reporter: Aditi Rajagopal
Camera: Saravanakumar, Aravind Mohanraj
Video editor: David Jacobi
Supervising editors: Kiyo Dörrer, Joanna Gottschalk & Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our channel explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

#PlanetA #Traffic #SustainableTransport

Read more:

Leapfrogging past the urban highway: https://www.itdp.org/2021/04/02/leapf...

COP26 transport declaration: a missed opportunity for India: https://www.orfonline.org/expert-spea...

TERI: The best way to predict the future is to create it: https://www.teriin.org/sites/default/...

Special thanks for background interviews:
V Manjula, IAS, Directorate of Urban Land Transport, Karataka
Karthik Ganeshan, CEEW
Promit Mookherjee, ORF Online
Mr Muralidhar Rao

Additional footage courtesy: Imago

00:00 Intro
01:00 How it got so bad
03:35 More roads, less traffic?
05:55 Windshield bias
06:32 Cars bring problems
07:55 Unclogging the streets
10:03 Transit-oriented development
12:09 Conclusion