Central government is planning to fix life span of commercial vehicles to 20 years and this will come into effect from 2020
Pollution is one of the major problems faced by our country and government is taking lots of initiative to make our country better for future. One of the steps taken by government is to introduce stringent emission norms as India will skip BSV and goes straight to BSVI, which will certainly reduce harmful gases coming from vehicles.
The government is also pushing EV revolution for future and by 2030, at least 30 percent of sales are expected to come from EV vehicles. But vehicles currently on road are polluting more and among them major contributor is commercial vehicles. Currently, more than 7,00,000 commercial vehicles registered before 2000 are running on our roads.
To reduce pollution from old vehicles, central government is planning to fix life span of commercial vehicles to 20 years and this will come into effect from 2020, so the commercial sector has time to meet new law. The first draft of this new policy was released in 2016 by road transport and highway ministry, but it proposed 15 years life for commercial vehicles.
Then a committee of secretaries was formed to further study about the decision and they suggested that 15 years is very small and the owner might not get enough profit from the vehicle. So the committee decided to extend the life span to 20 years and it will be submitted before cabin to get approval.
But it’s not all bad news for commercial vehicle sector as government is planning to give incentives for customers. The steel ministry will set up scrapping centres across the country and owner needs to take their old vehicles to these centres along with original vehicle documents. The customer will receive a certificate and price for the scrap.
Then the owner needs to provide this certificate to dealers for discount on new vehicle and they will get reduction in GST during purchase along with fare scrap value and special cash discount from manufacturers. The total price drop will be around 15 percent, which will certainly help the customer. After cabin approval, the proposal will be submitted to GST council to fix the tax rate.