The Centre’s move to introduce BS6 norms in 2020 will get the green light soon and accordingly a notification will be issued in the regards soon. It had announced earlier this year that India would directly jump from BS4 to BS6 norms in view of rising levels of pollution.
The benefits of the moving directly from BS4 norms (which will be in full effect from April 2017) to BS6 norms are the improvement in emissions and obviously the quality of air. However, it will be a major challenge for the automakers as they would have to collectively invest around Rs 1500 crore to bring the auto industry to the new standard. There would also have substantial investment from the oil companies as they would have to ensure the availability of BS6 grade fuel across the country.
What is interesting is that most manufacturers who have export operations in India make Euro6 compliant vehicles for foreign markets and it is only a matter of producing the same for the local market. This of course has its own challenge which would be the pricing of the vehicle to ensure that it has not veered off too far from the equivalent model being produced at a lower emission standard.
Edit: The SIAM has issued a statement stating its consent for making this leap from BS4 to BS6 norms. It has issued an official statement for the same which reads as follows.
“India has been the fastest at adopting new safety and emission norms. This leap frog would make India the first country in the world to accomplish such an accelerated progression in vehicular emission norms” Vinod Dasari, President, SIAM said. This would not only entail a significant telescoping of long term investments into a much shorter timeframe of 3-4 years, but also deployment of a much larger technical resource drawn from world over to enable compression in the time taken for technical development, testing and validation of the vehicles in Indian conditions."
He however cautioned that once the industry has chosen to go down the path of leapfrogging the emission norms, this roadmap should not be changed or delayed midway for any reason. He hoped that the oil sector would fulfil its role by making the required fuel available on a country wide basis as per the new timeline.
