SC bans old petrol, diesel vehicles in Delhi: Lack of authorised scrapyards, ground realities will hamper implementation of order

Despite the Supreme Court laying down a two-hour window for bursting ‘green crackers’ in Delhi-NCR, fireworks could be seen and heard throughout the long, smoky Diwali night. And that isn’t the only order of the highest court in the land that’s being flouted. Last week, the Supreme Court endorsed an National Green Tribunal order banning plying of 15-year-old petrol and 10-year-old diesel vehicles in Delhi-NCR. The Delhi government told the Supreme Court last Thursday that of 1.10 crore vehicles registered in the national capital, 40 lakh overage vehicles more than 15 years old (petrol) and 10 years old (diesel), have been de-registered by the transport department.

The morning after Diwali, the auto scrap market at New Delhi’s Mayapuri was fairly empty. Today is Vishwakarma Puja. “Aaj kaam kam hai, roz 200-500 gaadi aati hai Mayapuri mein, (there’s less work today. Two to five hundred cars usually turn up every day)” a scrap dealer said.  According to Ravinder Kumar, a local, the junk market was shifted here from Motia Khan in old Delhi in 1971 by the government. It is an ‘authorised junk market’, he added.

Most of the scrap material is sent in trucks to Mandi Gobindgarh in Fatehgarh district, Punjab. Known as Punjab’s Steel City, it processes around 40,000 tonnes of scrap daily. At this point, neither Mayapuri’s junkyard nor Mandi Gondindgarh, even if they stretch their limits, can handle the load of 40 lakh de-registered cars.

Firstpost spoke to some scrap dealers in Mandi Gobindgarh to gauge the process. No certificates for scrapped cars are handed over to owners at Mayapuri, so the industrial melting units sourcing directly from owners will at best ask them for a Registration Certificate (RC). “In India, we pay tax when we buy the vehicle and not after that, so when people are dumping their cars in junkyards, they aren’t legally bound to inform the motor vehicle department,” Dinesh Mohan, former transport secretary told Firstpost. “One may still possess RCs of cars that have been demolished because of a lack of authority to monitor documentation.”

Yet another dealer said his foundry only accepts auto scrap that’s been put through a bailing machine and turned into a cube with chokers along with the rubber, plastic and mirrors removed. In Mayapuri, we noticed that labourers were using hammers and saws and pulling out each part carefully for recycling purposes; a melting dealer in Punjab said he preferred taking large orders from known scrap dealers who know how to professionally remove chokers because they may cause blasts. He asked why 18 percent Goods and Services Tax isn’t imposed on auto scrap and that bills for auto scrap are never given with the scrap, which is melted and turned into ingots and billets, and then sent to rolling mills to be turned into garters, pipes and channels.

Mahindra Accelo (previously known as ‘Mahindra Intertrade’) and MSTC Ltd. (a Government of India Enterprise) joined hands to establish Cero, India’s maiden organised auto shredding venture and vehicle recycling unit at Greater Noida, which will recycle specialised steels and other non-ferrous metals in automobiles. India generates eight million tonnes of steel scrap yearly and there are plans of expanding this venture aggressively across the country. A dealer at Gobindgarh, who processes  100 tonnes of scrap metal a day said they reached out to him recently, but later decided to auction the scrap instead of giving a fixed amount to licensed dealers on a daily basis.

In August 2018, the Transport Department of the Delhi government notified guidelines for the disposal of the vehicles so that the government could comply with the various orders of the National Green Tribunal.  Section 12 of the guidelines lays down the scrapping procedure for impounded and abandoned vehicles.

It states that implementing agencies Delhi Traffic Police, Municipal Corporations, New Delhi Municipal Council, Cantonment Board and the Transport Department can confiscate any end-of-life vehicles found operational, or parked in a public place or discarded as junk and hand it over to an authorised scrap dealer.

As of now, there isn’t a single authorised scrap yard in Delhi, though the government is going to begin the certification process. The requirements: an office in Delhi and a scrap yard spanning not less than 1,000 square yard (9,000 sq ft) in a non-residential, commercial or industrial area. But most markets in Delhi are a mix of residential and commercial zones.

At the national level, a vehicle scrapping policy is expected to come into force from 1 April, 2020. Starting 2020, all pre-2000 registered commercial vehicles are to go off road. The government estimates that 6.4 lakh cars were registered before 2000, when the BS-I emission was introduced. As part of the policy, incentives are being worked out for owners to send their vehicles for scrapping.

The steel ministry is to set up scrapping units while the environment and forest ministry is set to bring out new rules and regulations. In March, at the high-level meeting in the Prime Minister’s Office attended by the CEO of Niti Aayog, with the secretaries of finance, heavy industries, transport, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, the vehicle scrapping policy was approved in principle.

At Mayapuri’s scrapyard, a radioactive blast occurred after a metal pipe containing Cobalt 60 was wrongly discarded by Delhi University professors in 2010. After that, a licence was required for using gas cutters. Contractors feel that move fuelled nepotism and bribery. They said these licenses can be procured within a day for less than Rs 1 lakh and e-waste certificates were issued to even those who didn’t own scrapping units.

The auto scrap market eventually moved out and shifted base to residential areas like Najafgarh on the Delhi Haryana border, Mustafabad near Haryana, and Mandoli and Sonia Vihar across the Yamuna. The contractors here feel the incident brought a bad name to Mayapuri, but didn’t make the area safer. They said municipal authorities make visits to inspect the use of gas cutters and are unconcerned about anything else. Contractors point to the setting up of a crushing plant in Noida where recycling will take place under the close watch of the government, and eat into their business.

In July 2018, New Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) released a report titled ‘Clunkered: Combating Dumping of Used Vehicles – A roadmap for Africa and South Asia’. The report stressed the need to reinvent the concept of extended producer responsibility. This concept requires manufacturers to ‘take responsibility of take-back, recycling and final disposal of their vehicles within the domestic economy, for the global supply chain. Vehicles in developing countries will require infrastructure for the final burial and recycling of material. Trade forums like the World Trade Organization, regional trade blocks, multilateral forums like the UNFCCC, and country blocks for international cooperation including G8, G20, BASIC etc need to develop a common framework for disposal of used vehicles.’

Some of the incentives proposed for commercial vehicle scrap are GST reduction, and fair prices: which is expected to reduce the cost of new vehicles by 15 to 20 percent. Similar incentives can be offered to private vehicles as well, so that polluting old cars aren’t put up for re-registration and packed off to smaller towns. Until the mechanism is worked out on ground, the Supreme Court’s order de-registering lakhs of cars seems rather difficult to implement.