 "A vehicle waits to be filled up with diesel at a petrol station in New Delhi (photo: Reuters)")
Transport authorities in the capital will have to multiply their efforts to identify lakhs of ten-year-old diesel vehicles after a National Green Tribunal (NGT) order on Monday said such vehicles need to be immediately de-registered.
Automobile industry experts have highlighted that there will be challenges in identifying and reaching out to these vehicles. Unlike Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's odd even exercise in Delhi, where a violating car was easily identified by the number plate or absence of CNG tag, it is not possible to identify ten-year-old vehicles running on diesel.
"That is going to be a mammoth task. Even if the transport department makes a list of such diesel vehicles and simply de-registers them, they cannot prevent all such vehicles from hitting the road," said an industry official.
In many cases, the ownership of these vehicles would have changed and the addresses of the owners would have also changed, making it difficult to reach the current owners.
To give effect to Monday's order, the NGT has asked the Regional Transport Office in Delhi to issue a public notice after the necessary steps are taken and to furnish the traffic police with a list of such vehicles that are to be de-registered.
During an earlier hearing, the tribunal had indicated the possibility of such a de-registration after it was told by the counsel for the government that over 3,000 offending vehicles were impounded in last year alone. An estimated 400,000 ten-year-old diesel passenger vehicles are present in Delhi.
Abdul Majeed, partner at Price Waterhouse, said, "If you de-register ten year old vehicles in Delhi, nothing stops such old cars from nearby cities to enter and run. So, any phasing out has to be done across the country with an incentive to owners of such vehicles."
