14 years after Calcutta HC ban, 1.5 lakh old vehicles still on road

KOLKATA: Fourteen years after the Calcutta High Court banned all commercial vehicles, which are more than 15-year-old, the city roads are teeming with such vehicles. Recently, the transport department has identified 1.5 lakh commercial vehicles, which were registered between 1970 and 1999 and are still plying in Kolkata and Howrah. These old vehicles have not been removed from the database of the transport department.
In 2008, the Calcutta High Court had banned all commercial vehicles more than 15 years of age. The presence of such a large number of old vehicles in the transport department’s database has left environment activists surprised.
Now, the transport department has started notifying the owners of these vehicles for a hearing before scrapping them permanently. The transport department took the help of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) for identifying the owners of these old vehicles.
“These vehicles could not be traced as most of them were registered in pre-computerized age and thus, these could not be traced in the system,” said a transport department officer.
Till December 31, 2019, 3,09,417 commercial vehicles were phased out in Kolkata and Howrah.
The older vehicles, experts said, produce higher levels of pollution because of the incomplete combustion of fuel.
The state transport department is set to ban more than 35,000 vehicles that are 15-year-old in Kolkata and Howrah in the next five years. The move is crucial for cleaning up the ambient air and decluttering the roads of these twin cities.