Registration of pre-owned diesel vehicles banned in Agra; includes cars that are 15 or more years old or do not comply Euro IV emission regulations
The local registration of pre-owned vehicles in Agra has been completely banned by Taj Trapezium Zone (TTZ) authority. The vehicles especially registered in NCR and other surroundings areas will be at the focal point as due to the recent drastic measures taken in Delhi to slap down pollution, the old cars have been sold elsewhere at a very low price.
The rule has come into effect since the new year off the back of Supreme Court’s decision to ban registration of diesel vehicles in the National Capital Region (NCR) for the first quarter of 2016 and the Agra RTO has already denied registration of several hundred vehicles without proper pollution certificates.
The Taj Trapezium Zone (TTZ) committee’s recent order will prevent re-registration of diesel-powered cars and other vehicles that do not comply with Euro IV emission norms or those which ran registered for 15 or more years old on the road in Agra.
After the National Green Tribunal (NGT) banned entering of a decade-old diesel cars into Delhi city limits last April, the owners of those large proportion of sedans, SUVs and hatchbacks have had no choice but to sell them for unprecedented low prices to pre-owned car dealerships.
They in-turn sell those vehicles from NCR and Chandigarh in various Uttar Pradesh districts close to Delhi for a scarcely believable 40,000-50,000 rupees. Agra has had a fair share of the banned cars that ups the pollution levels and in order to restrict them from causing more hazard this decision has been taken by TTZ.
The TTZ consists of world heritage sites like the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri amongst over 40 other monuments and the rising air pollution scale has become a major problem in the last decade. The RTO officials conceded that a comprehensive ban on re-registered vehicles could be implied in the weeks to come.
The Central Pollution Control Board says the PM10(particulate matter in air) has gone up from 133 to 306 micrograms per cubic metre between 2002 and 2014. The Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM) has scaled up more than twice from 275 to 675 micrograms per cubic metre in the same period whilst the Nox levels more than doubled up from 17 to 38 micrograms per cubic metre.
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