Supreme Court May Levy Additional Cost For Sale Of BS III Vehicles

Bharat Stage IV (BS-IV) emission norms are all set to be enforced from the 1st of April 2017 and many automobile manufacturers like Bajaj had rushed to the court seeking permission to allow them to dispose of their stocks. Bajaj said that it had completed the conversion to manufacturing and selling BSIV compliant vehicles well before time and completely stopped manufacturing BS-III vehicles.

According to a report in TOI a bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta said the Centre had spent thousands of crores of rupees to upgrade technology to produce BS-IV fuel and the companies could not be allowed to frustrate the government's initiative to check increasing pollution levels by selling around 8.2 lakh BS-III vehicles which they are holding in stocks.

Senior advocate Harish Salve and lawyer Aprajita Singh, who are assisting the court as amicus curiae, told the bench that the companies were well aware that BS-IV norm would kick in from April 1 but they kept manufacturing vehicles with older technology. They urged the court to ban manufacture and sale of BS-III vehicles as the Centre had spent Rs 18000-20000 crore for producing cleaner fuel.

The court has put forth three options in front of the auto makers- 1) to take a drastic step to ban registration of vehicles, 2) allow its registration but ban plying of such vehicles from major cities, 3) ask the companies to pay some additional cost for creating health hazards and reimburse the Centre which spent enormous money in upgrading fuel standard. The court said it would take a call on the issue on the 27th of March 2017.