Is banning cars outright the way to tackle air pollution?

 

Wrong way to go about cleaning the air! There is no quick fix solution to cleaning Delhi's air other than orchestrating a total shut down on all activity for a week or 10 days. All schools/colleges to be closed, all offices to be closed, all petrol pumps to be closed and all vehicles to be banned on the roads except for emergency and police vehicles, non-polluting vehicles like electric cars. That apart we can at least start moving in the right direction as far as vehicular pollution goes.
1. Why ban technologies or fuels? Set emission norms and whoever can meet them using whichever fuels and technologies is perfectly fine. That's how California has gone about it and that's how the European Union is going about it.
2. Allow duty-free import of electric cars for three years and at the same time set up charging stations. Mandate that every parking lot operator should have 10 per cent of his capacity electric car-friendly and increase that every year - 20 per cent in 2017 and 30 per cent in 2018. Start incentivising the Make in India for electric cars, whichever company imports as many electric cars in India has to make as many electric cars in India in a five-year period. Make all components required for the manufacture of electric cars duty-free.
3. Make start/stop that cannot be switched off mandatory on all new cars from 2016 and make it mandatory for air-con systems of cars to run on electricity and not on the engine.
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4. India for the large part is at BS-III with certain cities and Delhi NCR at BS-IV. Switching to BS-V will cut down particulate matter emissions by over 90 per cent. The one biggest factor stopping us from moving forward with stricter emission norms is the quality of fuels. It's not the fault of the vehicles or their manufacturers - it is that of the State and the State-owned PSUs. The government and State players have made the air hazardous for us. If refineries cannot switch to BS-V compliant fuel by March 31, 2016 then allow duty-free import of clean diesel fuel and let petroleum PSUs that cannot adapt and modernise face the heat. They are the ones holding the country and our health to ransom.
5. What the government has to do is hasten the availability of clean fuels, make a switch to BS-V across the board for all private and commercial vehicles and get particulate filters retrofitted in cars that were Euro-IV compliant.
6. Cannot equate private vehicles with commercial vehicles. How can you put a blanket ban on 10-year-old vehicles and not distinguish between private vehicles that clock 10 times less miles on an average. And what about someone whose vehicle is as good as new or has a new engine? There needs to be a different set of judgement criteria for private and commercial vehicles.
7. How can the courts decide the life of vehicles? They can ask manufacturers to provide the life of the vehicle along with other specifications and set parameters to gauge that. It is like equating an over-engineered Mercedes which as a taxi in Germany easily does a million kilometres before it is sold off to run in markets like Morocco where they continue to be used as taxis as having the same life as another vehicle which has a tendency to fall apart in less than 10 years.