Supreme Court bans sale, registration of BS-III vehicles

The Supreme Court on Wednesday banned the sale and registration of vehicles which are not BS-IV compliant from April 1, 2017 across the country. The order was passed by the bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta.

That is, from April 1, all new vehicles to be sold in India will have to meet the Bharat Stage-IV emission norm standards. The apex court observed that “health of the people is far more important than the commercial interest of automobile manufactures”.

The apex court observed that the automobile companies knew about the BS-IV notification in 2014 and when people were aware in 2010 that it was coming up, then the firms should have scaled down the production of BS-III vehicles.

More about the court proceedings can be read here.

“Given the fact that as many as 20 million vehicles are registered in a year (as per the data of the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways), this transition will make significant difference to public health exposure,” said experts welcoming the order.

“The Supreme Court's order restraining the manufactures from selling BS-III vehicles from April 1 onwards is a welcome step and a historic step towards cleaner vehicles. Apart from putting focus back on air pollution, the order also signifies that we all need to take environmental directives seriously,” said Amit Bhatt, Director-Integrated Transport, Sustainable Cities, World Resources Institute India.

“Like vehicles, thermal power plants are also a big contributor towards air pollution, hence the next step in that direction is for the government to implement the December 2015 notification on emission standards for thermal power plants in a time-bound manner and not dilute them.

“The judgment today is a very crucial step in putting public health above business or economic interest of few and that should be reciprocated to the thermal power generation sector too,” said Sunil Dahiya, Campaigner, Greenpeace India.

“This is a significant step forward as this gives the message and the lesson that the automobile industry will have to walk the extra mile to address the expansive concern around public health and not weigh down the transition by taking a very narrow technical view,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).

Noting that air pollution has already emerged as a serious public health crisis in the Delhi-NCR region as well as in rest of the country, the experts said the 2017 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report suggests India has the second highest number of early deaths due to particulate matter 2.5 in the world.

Environment activist Ritwick Dutta said that at a time when there should be stricter regulations as well as action with respect to control of air pollution, the exact opposite is happening.

“There has been a systematic rollback and dilutions with respect to air control regulations. Over the last few months, the government has done away with the requirement of consent under the Air Act for a range of projects which includes buildings and construction projects.

“There is no seriousness in implementing the new emission standards for coal fired power plants as power plants are being approved based on the old standards. Thus, there is a complete lack of sensitivity to this critical issue,” he said.

CSE's Roychowdhury maintained that it is “unacceptable” that even though the industry is producing BS-IV vehicles since 2010 for earmarked regions, most companies have not slowed down the production of BS-III vehicles.