‘77% vehicles are plying without pollution check’
EPCA REPORT Of total 28 transport inspectors, only one available to check PUC centres
At least 77% of the 70 lakh registered vehicles in Delhi are running without the mandatory pollution under control certificate and the city’s emission testing centres are grossly understaffed, says a report by the Supreme Court-appointed Environmental Pollution Prevention and Control Authority (EPCA).
Vehicles are a major contributors to pollution in Delhi, which is among the most polluted cities in the world. The report puts under scanner the 970 PUC centres in the city, which are certified to check the emission levels of vehicles in the city.
The report, a copy of which is with HT, was submitted to the Supreme Court on Friday.
According to the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989, every BS-III emission-compliant motor vehicle needs to get a pollution test every three months while BS-IV vehicles need to take the test annually.
Older cars are more harmful for the environment as they have primitive pollution control systems and emit more harmful gases than newer variants.
According to estimates of EPCA, every quarter there should be around 59 lakh PUC tests in Delhi, but “the period of November 2016 to January 2017 (three months) shows tests of only 13.7 lakh vehicles”. Thereby the compliance rate comes to 23.2%.
“A large number of vehicles in Delhi remain outside the PUC testing network,” the report says, adding that even among the vehicles turning up for tests, the failure rate is extremely low and that the existing norms cannot even identify at least 15-20% grossly polluting vehicles in the on-road fleet.
“Nearly all vehicles pass the tests. Due to poor recording of failed tests and due to very lax norms the overall failure rate in Delhi is 4.69 per cent. For the diesel vehicles tested, the failure rate stands at 1.68 per cent, compared to 5.18 per cent for petrol vehicles,” it says.
A serious flaw is that failed tests are not recorded as vehicle owners refuse to pay the fee if their vehicles fail. Therefore, the pass-fail data compiled by the transport department shows very poor failure rate.
“It is therefore, important to mandate advance payment of fees before the test is conducted and the software should be changed accordingly to plug this loophole,” the report says.
According to the law, a vehicle without a valid PUC Certificate is liable to be prosecuted under Section 190(2) of the Motor Vehicles Act.
“The overall assessment has revealed that there are serious quality concerns in the way PUC tests are conducted and equipment are maintained in numerous PUC centres across the NCR region.
“In Delhi alone there are 971 centres but the transport department has only 28 inspectors and among them only one inspector is available for actual on ground inspection of so many stations,” the report says.
The city of about 20 million people has been struggling to clean up its air that contains a toxic cocktail of dust, smoke and gases from vehicle and factory exhausts.
The condition worsens every autumn and winter as the city, buffeted by farmers burning crop