Going green: Government steps on gas

The government will soon notify new rules making it must for car manufacturers to improve per kilometer mileage of their fleet by around 20% in next eight years and have fuel efficiency based rating for cars from next year, Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Aug 24, 2012, 07:52:45 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government will soon notify new rules making it must for car manufacturers to improve per kilometer mileage of their fleet by around 20% in next eight years and have fuel efficiency based rating for cars from next year.

The new fuel economy rules sent to Law ministry for final vetting after approval from Prime Minister’s Office also prescribes penalty for car manufacturers failing to meet the new specifications.

"The penalty will depend on the deviation from the standard and would be a disincentive to sell fuel guzzling cars," said a senior government official, requesting anonymity.

Primarily the new norms will do two things.

First, introduce a five star based labeling system meaning the most fuel efficient car in a particular weight category say up to 1,000 tonnes (small car) will get five star rating. The lowest will have one star rating.

"The vehicles not meeting even the lowest level will have to be phased out," said a senior official of Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), tasked with formulating a labeling mechanism with the auto-industry.

Ajay Mathur, former BEE director general had recently told HT that the labels will be for a category of vehicles such as small, medium and big cars to help consumers to take an informed decision on how much they can save on fuel by buying a particular star rated car.

Linked with the labeling would be fuel efficiency standards for entire fleet of a car manufacturer, called Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards and measured in terms of global warming causing carbon dioxide emissions.

BEE has suggested 10 alterative to car manufacturers to meet the new norms.

As of now, the average fuel mileage of auto industry is 16.6 kms per litre of fuel. The government wants to increase it to 18.1 kms/litre by 2015 and 20.79 kms/litre by 2020.

The new norms have auto manufacturers and environmentalists pitted against each other.

The Society of Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) has termed the new norms as "unrealistic" and "difficult to implement" whereas Delhi based advocacy group Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said it would have been much better.

"The government should not get pressurized and delay notification of the new standards," said CSE’s associate director Anumita Roy Chowdhury. SIAM director general Vishnu Mathur retorted: "We are in favour of fuel efficiency norms. But they should be practical and should not drive out industrial out-put."

The government officials expect the rules to be notified by this September with the labeling mechanism coming into force from April 2013.

The BEE has estimated the new standards would mean an up to eight percent increase in car prices which the buyers would be able to recover in three years because of fuel savings. For India, it will mean saving 3 million metric tons of oil (Rs. 13,800 crore annually) by 2015 and 11 million metric tonnes of oil (Rs. 45,000 crore annually) after 2020.

New fuel efficiency norms
2011 : 6 litres for 100 kms or 16.61 km per litre of fuel
2015 : 5.51 litres for 100 kms or 18.1 km per litre of fuel
2020 : 4.81 litres for 1000 kms or 20.79 km per litre of fuel.

Labelling
A must star based ranking of cars depending for different weight categories from 2013.
One star least fuel efficient and five star most efficient.
Efficiency of a car would be 20% less than that mentioned on the label.

Implications
Up to 8-10% increase in car prices
Additional cost for car buyer could be recovered in three years
Three metric tonnes of fuel to be saved by 2015
Car manufacturers say it could cause dip in car sales, which increased by 30% in 2011.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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