No sale of Bharat Stage-III vehicles from Apr 1 : SC
Source: The Sangai Express / IndiaToday.in
New Delhi, March 30 2017:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued order that from April 1, 2017, only BS-IV compliant vehicles will be sold by auto companies.
This comes as a big jolt to auto companies, as they have around 8.5 lakh vehicle with BS-III engines in their inventory.
The bench was headed by Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta.
The estimated worth of these BS-III vehicles is around Rs 12,000 crore.
The apex Court rejected auto companies plea over the demand for relief of six to seven months.
Car manufacturers had approached the Supreme Court to dispose of their stock as the BS-IV emission norms are to come into force from April 1 this year.
The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) had submitted data on manufacturing and sale of BS-III vehicles on a monthly basis from January 2016 and told the Court that the companies were holding stock of around 8.24 lakh such vehicles, including 96,000 commercial vehicles, over 6 lakh two-wheelers and around 40,000 three-wheelers.
The manufacturers told the Court that they were allowed to sell their stocks with old emission norms on previous two occasions when the industry had switched to BS-II and BS-III in 2005 and 2010 .