On the first day of Delhi’s ban on older vehicles, festival deliveries, anniversaries and breakfasts were all stopped at border police checkpoints and turned back.Amit, 18, left his office in Gurgaon’s Sector 102 on Sunday morning in a BS-III mini-truck, carrying household goods for two drop-offs in Noida, including one at Atta Market in Sector 18. Traffic police asked where he was headed as he entered Noida, then stopped him twice more inside the city. They fined him and his co-worker Rs 10,000, he said.By the time he reached the DND Flyway, he was stranded again. “Now we have been stopped for the fourth time,” he said. He had called his manager repeatedly to ask what to do. “I just don’t understand these new rules,” he said.Until now, Delhi barred vehicles that do not meet the BS-VI emissions standard only when the air turned severe and the third stage of its pollution action plan, GRAP 3, was invoked. GRAP 3 was not in force on Sunday. This time, the Delhi government imposed the ban as a preventive measure, for the first time, ahead of the winter pollution season.Many drivers said they had no idea it had begun, and weekend travelers and professional drivers alike were turned back at the border. In Noida, where GRAP 1 is in place, BS-III vehicles have been banned from entering the city.Tarun, who left his home in Noida’s Sector 9 around 11 a.m. for breakfast with friends at a Bikanerwala in Mayur Vihar, never made it across the Chilla border. A Delhi traffic officer waved him over and told him his diesel car was BS-IV and he would have to turn around.Tarun knew about the GRAP 3 rule, like several others. “But I did not expect it to apply without GRAP 3 in place,” he said.Story continues below this ad“Restrictions like this keeps commuters like us out of Delhi until next year. This cannot be a long-term solution,” he said. “Till when will you stop every one of them?”Vishnu Kumar, an IT professional in his mid-30s, had crossed from Delhi into Gurugram on the Dwarka Expressway on Saturday in his BS-IV Maruti Swift, headed to a farmhouse for a small anniversary party with his wife. On Sunday morning, traffic police stopped them at the Bijwasan toll plaza on the way back.“But yesterday no one stopped me,” Vishnu told a group of traffic officers. “Please, I crossed yesterday, let me go.”“It was imposed only today,” one officer replied. “If we let you go, someone else will stop you.” The officer advised a detour through Manesar and onto the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal Expressway, which, according to Google Maps, would stretch his 90-minute trip home to Greater Noida into at least three hours.Story continues below this adFor those who drive for a living, the ban hit harder. At another Delhi-Haryana toll plaza on the Dwarka Expressway, Hamza, a Porter delivery partner from Nizamuddin, stood beside his parked mini-truck. He had entered Gurugram early that morning to deliver goods and was stopped on the way back for lacking BS-VI certification.“I remember there was checking last year as well, but no one stopped me, so I couldn’t have anticipated this,” he said. “Now I don’t know how to reach home.”The scene repeated itself along the DND and at Kalindi Kunj, the other Uttar Pradesh crossings. One truck driver told an officer that his owner had given him no warning and kept his driving license, leaving him with only the registration and pollution certificates. “Get them on WhatsApp,” the officer told him.Nearby, a man in his early 30s, who asked not to be named, ran across four lanes of traffic to ask two officers whether all BS-IV vehicles were barred from Delhi. They told him yes. His father, who runs a transport business in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, had called him on Sunday morning after two of the family’s trucks were stopped at the DND.Story continues below this ad“This is the festive season,” he said. “How many trips can we make in just these four months? No contractor will pay us if we can’t take his festival goods to Delhi. Where will we earn money during the pollution season?”