A MINDLESS POLICY

FOCUS VEHICLE SCRAPPAGE

- Shivaji Sarkar

India is now officially a $4 trillion economy— but in truth, it is far more potent.

It does something no other country in the world does, not even the US: it wants to junk vehicles worth Rs 18 trillion every year! In Delhi, 62 lakh so-called "end-of-life (ELV)" vehicles were targeted. Policemen, unable to prevent crimes, were deployed instead to chase down and impound nearly 200 vehicles from people on their way to work, hospitals, or schools - merely for the 'offence' of entering Delhi or stopping at a petrol pump. It's a new, innovative form of harassment that humiliates citizens and deprives them of property a cruelty even the much-maligned Leftist regimes never committed. Many of these vehicle owners have just completed seven years of EMI payments. Now, the state treats their hard-earned asset as waste.

The Quixotic policy also destroys the concept of the National Capital Region (NCR), once envisioned as an integrated urban unit across Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi. The central government must now scrap this unimaginative car-junking policy. Let vehicles run until they reach their true end-use perhaps 40 years or more and let Indian wealth grow naturally.