Supreme lesson

The Supreme Court's order to ban the sale of BS-III vehicles upholds public health over commercial interest. Automobile industry cannot take a narrow legal view to sell older technology

What companies delaying transition to cleaner technologies can learn from the ban on the sale of BS-III vehicles

INA landmark judgement on March 29, 2017, the Supreme Court bench comprising Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Deepak Gupta prohibited registration of vehicles that do not meet the stringent Bharat Stage-IV (bs-iv) emission standards from April 1, 2017. Vehicles that meet the older emission standards of bs-iii can be registered after the cut-off date only if they were sold before March 31, 2017. The bench ruled that the number of unsold stock of bs-iii vehicles “may be small compared to the overall number of vehicles in the country but the health of the people is far, far more important than the commercial interest of the manufacturers”.

The ruling came after four days of protracted courtroom drama, with the automobile industry virtually staging a war to get permission to sell their bs-iii inventory even after April 1, 2017. But amicus curiae Harish Salve made it clear that the manufacturers were given an entire year for transition to bs-iv.

Anticipating this situation, the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (epca), which was appointed under the Supreme Court’s directive to oversee environmental issues in the National Capital Region of Delhi, had convened a meeting with the automobile industry in October 2016 to give them an advance notice for reducing the inventories of bs-iii vehicles and ramping up the production of bsiv vehicles. In this meeting, representatives of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural