Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) in a report pointed out the hurdles the department is facing with the new network installed to monitor the vehicular emissions in Delhi. The report pointed out that it was facing issues with data, accuracy, and usability of the information from the online system and this is despite the massive expenditure in setting up the system.
It has also proposed an alternative method to get the problem under check.
Environment Pollution Control Authority has said that the data collected from the centralised PUC network set to check vehicular emissions is difficult to deal with and in fact referred to it as virtually unusable, reported Indian Express quoting EPCA report. EPCA in its report also said that the “manual method” used in NCR cities provided data that was much more useful.
The data collected after the PUC test is directly transferred to the central server but the report pointed out “Properly disaggregated data related to vintage of vehicles in terms of adherence to BSIV, BSIII or BSII; older emission standards; age or manufacturing date of vehicles, or vehicle category-wise data was not available.”
The report also said that Delhi government had spent a hefty amount for setting up the PUC network. Pointing out the shortcomings of the system, the report said that the data from cars and two wheelers were combined together. Moreover, it said that some vehicles which did not abide by the norms and exceeded the pollution limit were categorised ‘PUC pass’.
Missing key categories and patterns in the data were other problems mentioned in the report. The EPCA has proposed a uniform common format for PUC data recording and reporting for the manual as well as the automatic data.
