The Delhi government’s battle against vehicles older than 15 years, which account for an estimated one-third of the Capital’s total vehicular population, is expected to be delayed further despite a stern reminder from the National Green Tribunal (NGT) earlier this week.
On Monday, the NGT had pulled up the Delhi government and the police for not taking its order to take vehicles older than 15 years off Delhi’s streets “in the same spirit” as their “active” status during schemes such as the recently-concluded phase II of the odd-even scheme.
Currently hemmed in between working out the modalities related to carrying out a Supreme Court directive banning the operation of diesel-run cabs and an attempt at softening its blow on the livelihoods of as many as 27,000 drivers, a source said the government would be in a position to take coercive action against vehicles older than 15 years “in due course of time”.
Huge numbers
The records compiled by the Delhi Transport Department, since the NGT’s first direction in November 2014, peg the total number of vehicles older than 15 years plying in the Capital – registered both privately and commercially – at a little over 28 lakh.
The number is close to a third of the total population of registered vehicles in Delhi, which is recorded at 88.27 lakh. A source from the Transport Department said that while an official exercise to classify these as private and commercial was yet to be carried out, “a majority of these” were believed to be privately-owned and running on petrol.
This, said an official, was because current records put the total number of private vehicles registered till March 31, 2015 at 84.75 lakh in comparison to a relatively paltry 3.56 lakh commercial vehicles.
“The sheer volume of such vehicles plying on Delhi’s streets is immense and more than a challenge to take sustained coercive action against, despite the combined efforts of both the Delhi Traffic Police and the Enforcement Wing of the Delhi government,” said a source.
The officials, however, agreed that many of these vehicles might have been sold, scrapped or moved out of Delhi. The transport department, however, does not have any record of such vehicles.
“That, however, does not mean that enforcement of the NGT’s order has not taken place since it was issued in November, 2014; we are waiting for the official order (related to Monday’s proceedings) to be communicated to us following which the issue will be considered by the departments concerned and its execution will begin in due course of time,” the source added.
In response to a question related to the seeming harm that vehicles older than 15 years continued to wreak on Delhi’s ambient air quality, a senior government official argued that “a considerable percentage” of vehicles older than 15 years “were more than likely” to have gone off road due to maintenance in addition to wear and tear issues.
However, what was also a fact, the official admitted, was that vehicles belonging to defence, various ministries and senior functionaries across “VIP categories” “could have” more than made up for the gradually diminishing numbers of vehicles going off the roads due to wear and tear.
On its part, the Delhi Police had submitted that it had issued fines to 1,000 such vehicles and had also begun impounding them.
There are. 28 lakh vehicles older than 15 years — a third of the total number of vehicles in Delhi
