The Transport Department is faced with an uphill task to phase out over 1.5 lakh diesel vehicles which are more than 15-years-old. The enforcement wing of the department has only 115 members in its 25 teams to enforce the National Green Tribunal’s order to de-register and scrap 2.82 lakh vehicles older than 10 years, of which 1.61 lakh are privately owned, in a phased manner.
Chief Secretary KK Sharma has called a meeting with Commissioner of Delhi Police Alok Kumar Verma, vice-chairman of DDA and all Commissioners of the respective Municipal Corporations, NDMC and Delhi Cantonment Board on Tuesday to chalk out a detailed blueprint to implement the NGT order. Sharma has been asked by the court to submit a detailed report by next week.
A transport department officer said the help of the Delhi Police traffic department’s 5,717 police personnel — of which around 3,000 are on duty in city — will be taken extensively to ticket and impound vehicles. But the main focus of police personnel deployed on city roads is to maintain traffic. This will lead to a major crisis for the city transport department.
Special Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Sandeep Goel said that the traffic police will start issuing challans or impound the vehicles once the transport department shares the vehicle registration numbers with them.
Since impounding will be done in five stages of vehicles from 15 to 10 years, the biggest challenge the department will face is parking them. The existing lots across the city can accommodate only 6,000 vehicles. To ease the situation, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has been directed to provide space to police for parking the vehicles. The DDA has also been asked to identify new sites for the purpose.
Of around 1.31 lakh diesel commercial vehicles, 90,000 will be de-registered and from 13,000 diesel passenger commercial vehicles, 11,500 will be de-registered. Also, 900 ambulances of 1,200 would be declared unfit to continue the services. The Delhi transport department will also issue a public notification of de-registration of all 10-year-old diesel vehicles in Delhi.
The tribunal order states, “We further clarify that in terms of the orders of the Tribunal, every State has to identify areas where the dispersion of the air is higher and vehicular density is least. If the States have not done it so far we grant one last opportunity to the States and the Union Territories to identify such areas and put them on respective websites. The Regional Transport Office of Delhi will issue NOC for transfer of these vehicles only for such areas which are identified by the States,” the court said.