In an effort to curb the rapid dieselisation, the Environment Pollution Prevention and Control Authority (EPCA) has called for a proposal to impose both a one time green tax on new cars and also reintroduce the system of owners paying an annual tax on diesel cars.
The EPCA describes this as “an annual environment compensation charge amounting to 2 per cent of the purchase value of a petrol car and 4 per cent of the purchased value of a diesel car.” The second tax they want levied is an “environment compensation charge of 25 per cent of the sale value of the diesel car to be collected by the dealers at the time of the sale.”
This proposal has the active support of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) who has also been pushing for an annual road tax to be levied on both diesel and petrol cars in order to put a break on the 1,400 new vehicles being added to the NCR region on a daily basis.
CSE has been making a push for the beefing up of the bus transport systems across cities to curb clogging of streets and ensure a drop in pollution levels.
The EPCA warns that in 2010, 1.2 million vehicles entered and left NCR every day with 70 per cent of these vehicles being cars.
New studies have shown that the maximum exposure to vehicular fumes is up to 500 metres from the roadside and 55 per cent of Delhi’s population lives in that zone.
The situation is equally bad in the metros of Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Kolkata, the EPCA points out. Sunita Narain, director general of the CSE, believes, “The annual tax on cars should come back. After all, buses which are far less polluting are being made to pay an annual road tax.”
“We are talking to insurance companies so that they can collect the tax and give it to the government,” Ms Narain said.
A recent WHO report has reclassified diesel exhaust as Class 1 carcinogen with definite links to lung cancer and placed it in the same class of deadly carcinogens as asbestos, arsenic and tobacco.
The other problem with dieiel is that while Europe and the United States have gone in for clean diesel with a sulphur content as low as 10 parts per million (in the US it is 15 parts per million), most of India is using diesel with sulphur content of 350 parts per million.