How can behavioural science aid air-quality policies in India

Behavioural insights reveal how real-world decisions shape air-quality outcomes and strengthen last-mile delivery

With the launch of Mission LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment) by India, a people’s movement focused on encouraging behavioural change towards sustainability, at COP26 in Glasgow, behavioural science has gained prominence in implementation strategies. The discipline generates insights on what motivates changes, and which nudges, incentives, or defaults can resolve poor last-mile uptake and enable widespread adoption of sustainable practices. Recognising the unique ways in which people interact with public policies, this qualitative intervention has been employed by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) to determine how it can reduce construction dust emissions, promote electric vehicle adoption, reduce stubble burning, and turn school campuses ‘zero-waste’. CEEW also assessed the effectiveness of different nudges to tackle emissions from different air pollution sectors.

What is behavioural science and why does it matter for air-quality action in India?

Behavioural science (BeSci) is an iterative, evidence-based approach that examines how people attend, decide, and act in real-world contexts. It is used to design policies that work with human biases rather than against them.

BeSci application typically follows a structured process: defining the problem, diagnosing barriers, designing an intervention, and rigorously testing it. Globally popular examples include work by Thaler and Benartzi as part of the “Save More Tomorrow” campaign. It used automatic enrollment in employee savings schemes and regular savings contributions to help workers save more for their future. This became a landmark example of how defaults and commitment devices could dramatically improve financial behaviour.

The global success of behavioural interventions led CEEW to similarly target specific behaviours to evaluate the efficacy of the discipline in the realm of air pollution in India.

1) Reducing particulate matter (PM) emissions and increasing speed compliance at construction sites using voluntary declarations and verbal reminders

Heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) often fail to comply with speed limits at construction sites, stirring up a lot of dust, contributing to excessive PM emission. While analysing this problem, drivers’ lack of awareness about PM impacts and of the correlation between speeding and pollution emerged as the main barriers to speed compliance. To resolve this, CEEW conducted a pilot study at Gurugram’s Signature Global India site in April–May 2024, appointing security guards as key messengers of speed compliance, equipping them with verbal prompts and visual posters that linked overspeeding with increased dust plumes. CEEW also introduced voluntary speed limit commitment forms for drivers to encourage voluntary compliance. 

These behavioural changes brought about significant results. Speed limit compliance rose from ~16 per cent to ~63 per cent, while PM10 and PM2.5 emissions fell by ~11 per cent and ~29 per cent, respectively, compared to pre-intervention levels at the construction site. 

Key learnings

• Identify the right ‘target behaviour’. Effective interventions depend on selecting the most impactful behaviour, grounded in data rather than intuition. In our construction site study, hyperlocal air quality (AQ) monitoring data identified vehicular movement, not general dust, as the most pollutant-intensive activity on-site. This led us to focus specifically on speed compliance, ensuring behavioral interventions targeted the activity with the highest emissions reduction potential.
• Leverage the ‘messenger effect’. Choosing the correct actor is as important as choosing the behaviour. On-site, security guards served as credible, authoritative messengers positioned exactly where the action occurs. Their role enabled consistent enforcement and better compliance, demonstrating how the right messenger can significantly strengthen behavioural outcomes.

Limitations

• Constantly evolving site. Active construction sites are evolving constantly, making it difficult to maintain consistent intervention design and implementation. Frequent changes in site layout and workflows reduce stability needed for precise behavioural evaluation.
• Difficulty in collecting longitudinal data. As the site and vehicle movement patterns kept shifting, it was not possible to collect continuous, long-term air quality data. This limited the ability to measure the sustained impact of interventions beyond the pilot’s duration. 

Image 1 & 2. Incoming drivers were asked to commit to controlling their vehicular speeds before driving at the site. Source: CEEW

2) Experiential pilots to accelerate Amritar’s electric three-wheeler (e3W) adoption

In 2019, Amritsar Smart City Ltd (ASCL) launched the Rejuvenation of Autorickshaws in Amritsar through Holistic Intervention (RAAHI) scheme to shift the city's diesel-powered three-wheelers (d3Ws) to electric. The scheme mandated scrapping old diesel vehicles to receive a subsidy, which made e3Ws up to 46 per cent cheaper than diesel-run autos. However, despite these economical benefits, the transition remained slow. Interviews and focus group discussions with drivers by CEEW revealed that underlying biases, such as discrete mental accounting (mentally differentiating the new e3W loan (~INR 6,000) from their diesel savings (~INR 9,000)); sunk-cost fallacy (hefty investment in their current d3Ws); and priming and anchoring (underestimating the new e3W's range by 30 per cent by using e-rickshaws as a reference) shaped their hesitant behaviour. 

To counter the behavioural biases, CEEW with the support of ASCL and Amritsar municipal corporation, introduced three-month long experiential pilots where d3W drivers could use and drive e3Ws for three days. This ‘try-before-buy’ intervention, along with communications campaigns and community engagements highlighting the immediate benefits of driving e3W (such as smokeless, silent rides, social approval by pradhans), acted as the nudge, increasing confidence in the technology, resulting in the replacement of 1,300 d3Ws with e3Ws within a year (based on ASCL data in August 2025).

Key learnings

• Leveraging social norms. Close-knit communities exert strong influence on individual behaviour. Behavioural shifts are more likely when people see peers adopting the change. We engaged pradhans, local 3W stand leaders to shape group norms and influence purchase decisions. Peer-to-peer perception shifts were spearheaded by the local pradhans. 

Limitations

• Short pilot duration limits long-term insights. The trial was brief to capture sustained behavioural patterns in user experiences. Longer study periods are needed to understand durability, day-to-day usability, and real-world performance of vehicles over time.

Image 4. CEEW team in conversation with e3w drivers in Amritsar Source: CEEW

CEEW’s meta-analysis on the effectiveness of behavioural interventions in reducing air pollution indicates that there is currently limited behavioural science evidence specific to the Indian context. This scarcity highlights the immense value of conducting pilots, whether small or large. These on-ground experiments do more than just solve immediate problems. They serve as a strong foundation for future behavioural science research. By generating verified data and proving what works in real-world Indian scenarios, these pilots provide the crucial evidence needed to inform robust, scalable policy design, moving us from theoretical assumptions to evidence-backed solutions.

If India embeds BeSci into mainstream governance, it can bridge the persistent gap between policy design and citizen uptake, strengthening last-mile delivery across programmes.

Arvind Kumar is a Programme Associate and Sarthak Gupta is a Research Analyst, at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW). Send your comments to arvind.kumar@ceew.in

Arvind KumarAuthor

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