New Delhi, April 23, 2003: The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) condemns the way the Union ministry of road transport and highways (MRTH) has given ground to truckers: striking truckers had demanded a waiver on the proposed Mumbai High Court ban on 15-year-old commercial vehicles in the city. The ministry has helped the truckers find a way around the ban.

Arguing in favour of the truckers, the ministry has issued a public notice stating, "The ministry of road transport and highways has consistently held the view that the age of a vehicle need not be the deciding factor for its scrapping. As long as vehicles meet the prescribed emissions, fitness and road safety related norms they should be allowed to ply on the roads." This is an open defiance of the recent Mumbai High Court order and even that of the earlier Supreme Court ruling of July 28, 1998, which fixed the age of commercial vehicles at 15 years in Delhi to control air pollution.

Currently, the Central Motor Vehicles Acts and Rules (CMVR) does not even record the current ban on 15-year-old commercial vehicles in the National Capital Region of Delhi following the Supreme Court order. Worse, in its eagerness to assuage the truckers, the ministry is silent on the existing legal provisions of its own CMVR Act that already bars national permits to 12-year-old goods carriages and 15-year-old trucks on interstate routes.

The ministry ignores the public health implications of its own Act that requires retiring older and more polluting vehicles from long haul national routes to the city core and refuses to act on it. And in contravention of the well-intentioned judiciary, the ministry is now stalling the extension of the same provisions to Mumbai – undermining the citizen’s right to clean air.

The ministry, on the contrary, has the audacity to claim that the pollution under control (PUC) certificate is enough justification for these vehicles to have an unconditional and indefinite life on road. The ministry will not admit to its ineffectual emissions inspection regime that gives a clean chit to polluting diesel vehicles. A CSE survey of PUC centres from June to August 2002 demonstrated how difficult it is to detect gross polluters among diesel vehicles. While the average failure rate for all vehicles was less than 10 per cent, the failure rate for trucks was less than 1 per cent and not a single diesel bus actually failed the PUC tests in the stations surveyed in Delhi. Neither does the ministry want to make the inspection procedures rigorous and effective, nor does it want to put a cap on age. All it wants to do is to use the infructuous PUC as an alibi to allow unconditional freedom to old and polluting vehicles plying in our cities.

We have already witnessed the dip in pollution levels after polluting trucks went off the road during strike. This bears out that only a hard decision such as banning 15-year-old commercial vehicles, and moving the remaining city fleet of goods vehicles to cleaner fuels, can help to meet the challenge of lowering deadly diesel emissions.

A convoluted freight policy is responsible for the uncontrolled increase in the share of road transport in freight movement -- at the cost of railways -- with serious pollution fallouts. Road transport caters to nearly 60 per cent of the freight movement in the country. This has resulted in the creation of a powerful lobby that arm-twists the ministry. The government is giving in meekly to truckers who are holding the entire country to ransom with threats of price hike.