The bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Deepak Gupta on Friday took on record the joint affidavit submitted on behalf of Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and Central Pollution Control Board, and besides granting one week time for arriving at a decision on installation of air purifying towers, the court ordered the following:
- Random checking of vehicles to check the type of fuel; if illegal use of Kerosene oil is discovered, the owner/ driver as well as every responsible authority with respect to such violation shall be made accountable. The Delhi Pollution Control Board has been directed to take a note of those who are violating the order prohibiting usage of such oil.
- The State of Haryana and UP are not taking any steps to curb stubble burning , therefore the Chief Secretaries of the respective states have been called to be present in the court on next hearing and should file the affidavit on their behalf.
- It was pointed out by the Member Secretary of the CPCB, that the vehicles in totality contribute 28% of the total pollution ; wherein trucks contributes to 8%, two-wheeler 7%, three-wheelers 3%, cars 3%, bus 3% and LCV 1% of the said 28%.
- With respect to Odd-even scheme applicable on cars only which contribute only 3% of the total vehicular population, application of such a scheme is not the wholesome solution. The court thus directed senior counsel Mr. Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Delhi Government to come up with a solution better than the odd-even scheme.
- As pointed out by the Member Secretary of the CPCB (Central Pollution Control Board), there are in total 13 hot spots in Delhi and Delhi NCR area. So in that respect, court allowed one week time for taking effective steps for taking care of these hot spots.
- As pointed by Sr. Adv. Aparajita there is no cooperation on the part of DDA, PWD and NDMC. So it was ordered that full support be given to monitoring committee in executing the previous order of this court by the aforesaid bodies or by any other corporation.
The apex court has pointed out that since the instant matter is not an adversarial litigation, expedient steps must be taken by the concerned authorities in the discharge their duties in view of the Doctrine of Public Trust.
The matter is further listed for November 25, 2019.
— India Legal Bureau