NEW DELHI — Traffic was flowing smoothly Monday morning on Outer Ring Road in South Delhi, usually jammed at that hour by subway construction and cars. An upscale market was dotted with free parking spaces. Monkeys ambled down one street in the colonial heart of the capital, easily dodging the few cars.

It was the fourth day of traffic restrictions imposed by the government of the metropolitan Delhi region, part of a series of measures meant to reduce pollution. The two-week experiment, which began on Friday, has been derided in many quarters of Delhi, where having a car and driver is a status symbol, and rush hour is usually a clamor of horn blowing, triple parking and bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Under the policy, private cars are allowed on the streets on alternate days depending on their final license plate numbers, with Sundays exempt. It calls for penalties of around $30 for scofflaws, and its success is to be gauged by daily pollution measurements. In 2014, a World Health Organization study ranked New Delhi’s air quality the worst of nearly 1,600 cities surveyed.

In a release issued last week, the Delhi government said that the traffic police and the divisional commissioner would deploy teams to 120 traffic points and that the Transport Department would check for overcharging and “misbehavior” by auto rickshaw drivers.