SIAM to file Review Petition on BS-III Ban
Published On Apr 27, 2017
The 29th March verdict from Supreme Court on sales and registration of BS-III vehicles came as a shocker. The ban left stranded many of the manufacturers who have large unsold stock of BS-III vehicles. The automakers said that there were 800,000 BS-III vehicles when the ban came and out of these, about 100,000 were commercial vehicles.
The order wreaked havoc especially on Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland, the two major players in the game having 15,000 units and 10,664 units of unsold BS-III inventory respectively. This is a huge number when it comes to commercial vehicles. The manufacturers though abided by the verdict of the Apex court, still they regret the inconsistent regulations.
Having said that, Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) is now looking forward to file a review petition against the order, said some officials on the condition of anonymity. Most likely the review petition would be filed this week and it’s a kind of permission for a window to sale the unsold stock.
Vinod Dasari, President of SIAM, the auto industry body commented, “As per the government notification, sales of BS-III vehicles were allowed after 1 April. Now suddenly those BS-III vehicles are banned. I find it quite frustrating that something like this happens”. Although, Vishnu Mathur, Director General SIAM refused to comment on this.
On the other hand, Tata Motors’ executive director Ravindra Pisharody said that the company holds an unsold stock of about 15,000 vehicles. On asking about SIAM petition filing he was too tight lipped. Gopal Mahadevan, CFO, Ashok Leyland said that the unavailability of quality fuel prevented the automakers from producing BS-IV vehicles and company’s intention was not to postpone the implementation of the new regulations.
VECV too revealed their unsold stock of 1,500 units and stated that they are unaware of SIAM’s planning. In the Supreme Court verdict of 29th March, it said that the manufacturers were given a 5-year warning to analyse their production strategy in a bid to control the air pollution and systematically move on to the BS-IV regulations, but they didn’t pay heed.
Anumita Roychowdhury, Executive Director, research and advocacy and head of the air pollution and clean transportation programme at the Centre for Science and Environment, reiterated the same saying that India is already lagging behind in comparison to global emission standards following the BS-IV norms. He said manufacturers knew the technicalities of the BS-IV regulations and they could have systematically decreased the volume, but most of them gave cold shoulder response.
Concerns over the rising pollution level impelled the government to take strict action in order to make India align with the global emission standards (Euro-VI) by skipping the BS-V and directly moving on to BS-VI by the year 2020.
