Car manufacturers now have a healthy 5 years of time to upgrade their vehicles in order to make them BS-VI compliant.
Taking a step forward towards cleaner fuel and lower emission norms, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) had recently organised the 5th conference for ‘Diesel for Future’ and it was concluded that the industry will be skipping the BS-V norms and will directly implement BS-VI by 2020. The debate saw Indian Oil companies (OMC) committing to making BS-VI fuel ready by 2020 while giving car manufacturers enough time to upgrade to new technologies in order to comply with the new emission norms.
However, the Indian automobile industry is of the opinion that the changes needed to meet stringent emission norms involves time and upgrading to new technologies which also needs a massive amount of investments. Therefore, car makers stated that the BS-V and BS-VI norms should be implemented in a phased manner and BS-V should not be skipped altogether. Petroleum officials though, believe that the investment for upgrading to either norm will be similar and it only makes sense to transition to BS-VI that will see an overall lower amount of investment.
Moreover, adopting BS-V and then implementing the same will only push the period for BS-VI by another set of years which does not seem practical. The government is yet to apply BS-IV norms pan India with only 33 cities following the norm (rest of the country continues with BS-III) and there is already a delay of five years in implementation compared to Europe. Skipping BS-V will help us catch up with developed nations while also give car manufacturers enough time and less investment to make the necessary upgrades.
