Farming Vehicles, Construction Vehicles Exempt From BS-III Ban

The Supreme Court today clarified that farming vehicles like - tractors and combine harvesters and construction equipment vehicles (CEV) will be exempted from the recently imposed ban on the sale of Bharat Stage III or BS-III vehicles in India. The Apex court said that the new BS-IV order only applies to commercial goods carriers and passenger vehicles, and considering the vehicle types are classified under neither of these two categories the ban doesn't affect them as they have different emission norms.

Evidently, tractors follow Bharat Tractor Emission Norms a.k.a. TREM-IIIA, whereas, construction equipment vehicles have a different Bharat Stage III norm. These emission norms are different from the BS-IV norms that are followed by regular two-wheeler, three-wheeler, four-wheeler or commercial vehicles.

Clarifying the Supreme Court's statement, Indian Construction Equipment Manufacturers' Association President Anand Sundaresan told PTI, "The Supreme Court order to ban BS-III vehicles has been misinterpreted by many RTOs, in states like Delhi, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh. This has resulted in new construction equipment vehicles not being registered," The Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) in many states have been turning down the registrations of tractors and CEVs for being 'four-wheelers'. An estimated 25,000 tractors and over 1,500 units of construction equipment vehicles have not been registered by RTOs in the aforementioned states since the ban came into force on April 1.

This misinterpretation of the court order has affected several people involved in this sector, right from daily wage earners to component manufacturers as OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) had cut down production. In fact, farmers who bought new tractors in these states are stuck now as the vehicles are still not registered and may very well miss the season if the issue isn't resolved. An estimated 35,760 tractors were sold in the aforementioned states during the March-April 2017 period and most of them are not registered. Whereas, around 30 per cent of the monthly sales of the construction equipment vehicles sold in these states were affected in these last two months.

Currently, the tractor industry is working with the government to skip the next level of emission norm TREM-IIIB and go directly to TREM-IV by 2021-22, which will require the availability of high-quality fuels across the country.