Separate department soon on vehicle safety, emission

'Prices have to be determined by market forces'

Aiming to focus on road transport related issues, particularly to deal with road safety, technology, fuel and vehicle emission, the Centre is planning to create a separate department of transport sector.

The government has discussed with other ministries on having a separate Transport Department by carving out of the existing Road Transport and Highways Ministry and new department will be headed by a separate secretary. The government will give final shape to the proposal soon and send it for seeking cabinet approval, Vijay Chhibber, secretary, ministry of road transport and highways, told Deccan Herald here. Instead of focusing only on road designing-like tasks, the ministry wanted to have holistic approach on the entire transport sector. With the growing concern over increasing vehicular pollution and road accidents, the government is hoping that having separate department will help to deal better on issues like fuel technology, motor body specifications and emissions.

Having separate transport sector also helps to have better coordination and roadmap with other related ministry like railways, civil aviation, shipping and urban transport sector for framing policies, he said.

At present, the road transport and highway ministry is looking after the transport sector, it is limited on framing motor vehicle act while leaving its implementation to the state.

Chhibber also said that the ministry has agreed with the auto industry’s demand to roll out Bharat Stage (BS) V emission norms by 2019 and BS VI norms by 2023, with the notification to be issued by the month-end. India, at present, has BS IV emission norms for vehicles.
According to Society of Indian Automobile Manufactures, the industry produced a total of 23,366,246 vehicles, including passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, three-wheelers and two-wheelers in April-March 2015 as against 21,500,165 in April-March 2014, registering a growth of 8.68 per cent over the same period last year.