new delhi indias auto industry has called for comprehensive measures to deal with the sensitive issue of excessively polluting vehicles after the national green tribunal ngt ordered a ban on all dieselpowered vehicles that are older than 10 years in the national capital to improve the citys air quality the order is expected to cover around 119 lakh privatelyregistered diesel cars and about 35000 commercial vehicles these were registered before delhi made cng compulsory for commercial vehicles taking them off the road alone wont help say industry players they want a policy to compulsorily scrap old vehicles according to sources in the delhi government around 50000 to 75000 commercial diesel vehicles pass through the city every day and that include 2500 interstate buses that primarily run on diesel these buses are also likely to be banned from delhi roads if the ngt order is implemented companies as well as the apex body of the indian automotive industry society of indian automobile manufactures are demanding a fleet modernisation programme with incentives like the cash for clunkers scheme that helped europe to replace its ageing car population with new fuelefficient small vehicles a few years back various governments had doled out cash and other taxation incentives to customers to replace their older vehicles with new ones and that helped to get new vehicles and improve both transportation and environment we have been demanding a fleet modernisation programme from the government for the past five years to allow the industry to replace very old vehicles with new emissionmandated ones that could address this environment problem in a major way siam directorgeneral vishnu mathur told et the indian automotive industry is already making vehicles conforming to latest rules in europe for instance maruti suzuki makes all its cars based on the european unions end of life vehicles directive all its new cars met the guidelines where almost 85 of the vehicle and its components could be recycled and reused after the vehicle is scrapped a senior executive said hyundai motor said the company meets global vehicles manufacturing guidelines as it exports half of its india production we already conform to most of the environmental and other norms of the developed world and the same applies for the cars sold in india said rakesh srivasthava senior vp for marketing and sales terming the ban shortsighted some auto manufacturers said more stringent pollution checks would have been a better alternative they also want the authorities to address issues such as quality of fuel adulteration and fitness of vehicles environmentalists say diesel vehicles are few in delhi as the entire commercial and public transport run on cng a recent survey conducted by iitdelhi at petrol pumps and pollution check stations showed that less than 1 of those vehicles are more than 15 years old said parthaa bosu india director for clean air asia this indicates that the measure ban only addresses a small fraction of emission source in the city by chanchal pal chauhan et bureau