Clean fuels...
The manner in which low sulphur petrol and low sulphur diesel, have been introduced in Delhi to fulfil the requirements of a Supreme Court order, aimed at bringing down air pollution in Delhi, is threatening to derail the spirit of that very order. This cleaner petrol and diesel, containing 0.05 per cent sulphur, is meant for euro ii compliant cars and has been pegged at 13 to 52 paise higher respectively than the dirtier version, which contains 0.25 per cent sulphur.
This price rise will defeat the entire order. For some time now euro ii compliant cars have been running on the city's roads using high sulphur content fuel. Since this fuel is cheaper it will encourage car owners to further use it instead of the costlier one. These cars will then begin to emit almost as much as euro i compliant cars. But the story does not end here. Old vehicles also need better fuel to reduce their emission levels. Therefore there should have been some incentive to buy the cleaner fuel rather than the dirtier one. But even if he did not want to do that petroleum and natural gas minister Ram Naik could have easily raised the price of fuel across the board and only a marginal increase was required. This could have given him the kind of additional revenue he wanted.
The logic behind introducing clean fuels to run the cars flooding the market and choking the roads in the capital is to reduce the dangerously high air pollution load in Delhi. But the fiscal measures or market-based approaches to aid and abet this attempt are virtually missing.
It seems that in more progressive and enlightened nations. Nations that have fought the demon of pollution and taken sensible investment decisions to reduce it on all fronts, cleaner fuels are cheaper than dirtier ones.
But babudom is still to wake up to the real issues at stake. It is a good idea to keep something priced lower it one wants to encourage its use. After all let us take the case of diesel. The government keeps diesel cheap because they want to meet a national objective, that of food security. They want to encourage its use by farmers and the transport sector. This very low price is however also increasing the expansion of the private diesel car fleet. Cheap dirty diesel is being used to drive the cars of the filthy rich. Gross misuse. The lesson of keeping a dirty fuel cheap, however, has obviously not been learnt.
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