 "SC imposes green levy on trucks entering Delhi")
Restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court on commercial vehicles entering the Capital will come into force on Sunday, with the court rejecting the request of truck owners' associations to give more time to implement the order.
They submitted before a Bench headed by Chief Justice H L Dattu that the order passed earlier this month, imposing environment compensatory charges on them, would be tough to enforce in the absence of adequate infrastructure. Technical support for recovering the charges and detecting defaulters are not in place and therefore truck operators taking short-cuts through Delhi while carrying goods to other states would be harassed, they had argued.
However, the central and Delhi governments opposed these pleas and dubbed them specious. After hearing their opposition to the truckers' petition, the court refused to change the date fixed for November 1.
The court, in a public interest petition, ordered on October 12 that commercial vehicles entering Delhi should pay an environment charge apart from the municipal toll. The court listed vehicles into different categories, fixing the charges as follows:Category 2 (light duty vehicles) and Category 3 (2 axle trucks) Rs 700/(ii) Category 4 (3 axle trucks) and Category 5 (4 axle trucks and above) Rs 1,300.
Passenger vehicles, ambulances, vehicles carrying essential commodities like food stuffs and oil tankers were exempted.
The charge will be collected by toll operators without any deduction and handed over to the Delhi government every Friday. The Delhi Government shall furnish accounts of the receipts and the expenditure incurred to Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control authority) or EPCA, and to the court each quarter. Regarding modalities for toll collections, the court ordered that the toll collectors shall put in place a radio frequency identification (RFID) system at their own cost at nine main entry points in the city by November 30, 2015, and by 31st January, 2016 at all the remaining 118 entry points to the city, failing which the contractors will be treated as being in breach of their obligation. The RFID data will be supplied to the MCD and Transport Department of the Government of NCT Delhi. The NCT Government will install its own CCTV cameras at nine entry points and also organise surprise visits to oversee the collection of ECC and other necessary arrangements.
