Aaron Peckham and his volunteer-wordsmiths are tongue-tied. When I looked up #abandonedauto in his crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary recently, there were no entries under it. The online lexicon does have a phrase ‘ghetto car’, referring to a low-end car dumped on the street. This doesn’t convey the essence of the issue around abandoned vehicles: it isn’t a question of high-end or low-end; it is a question of cars using up valuable public space, and being left on the streets and ‘forgotten’.
Picking up the tab
Much like rubble from an old home dumped on the street, owners of these cars are not around to pick up the tab, leaving it to residents’ groups to take up cudgels against it. In India, bureaucratic efforts to deal with this problem have seemed desultory, but now, there are signs that civic authorities are trying to take it by the bumpers.
In Chennai, where I live, the Corporation has now asked residents to report vehicles abandoned on its roads. A 15-day grace period is coming to an end, and a crackdown, in tandem with the police, is expected soon. Smartphones are bound to play a massive role in such reporting.
If the mechanism for reporting is technology-driven and user-friendly, the results are likely to be impressive. The Delhi government is in the process of launching a free app, that may be called Katara Gaadi, to help residents report abandoned vehicles. Towards the fag end of 2016, the Andhra Pradesh government launched an app ‘PINS’ for stolen and abandoned vehicles. Called Property Identification and Networking System, the app relays information about these vehicles using a QR code system. This free app can be downloaded from Google Play and App Store.
Storing issues
While dealing with abandoned vehicles, the challenges before government agencies include a space for storage and a facility to junk those vehicles that can’t be salvaged in any manner.
The Greater Chennai Corporation is said to have identified three spaces across the city to keep vehicles removed from roads — those that remain unclaimed will go under the auctioner’s hammer. There will definitely be vehicles that put up a lacklustre show at an auctioning event. These machines can’t be restored, nor can their parts be salvaged. They have to be disposed of at a junking facility.
In mid-2017, the Hyderabad City Police made a list of nearly 1,600 abandoned vehicles and sought to find their owners before sending them to a public auction. A good number of them were so rusted that their engine and chassis numbers were not recognisable.
Junking it
The Delhi government seems focussed on addressing the problem resulting from such vehicles. It is likely to bring on board MSTC Limited, which is under the control of the Ministry of Steel and is raising an automobile scrap recycling facility in Greater Noida. It also plans to help residents who may want to junk their old vehicles, some of which may be way short of meeting its now-stringent emission standards. Delhi’s efforts to free its roads of abandoned cars is part of a larger exercise to put a strong parking policy in place. Illegal parking of all forms is expected to be dealt with firmly. What Delhi is trying to do may serve well as a template for other Indian metros, where illegal parking often does not spare even footpaths.