The Indian government on Friday finally released its draft on the much awaited policy of labeling the car cars with their standard fuel efficiency. The fuel efficiency labeling that is yet to be forced by the government will be somewhat similar to the five star scale energy efficiency labeling on the electronic equipments. It has been nearly four years since the government’s prospect of fuel efficiency labeling on cars was doing rounds in the Indian market, but little has been done in this regard so far. The consultation paper was finally brought out on Friday after years of tussle between Bureau of Energy Efficiency and ministry of road transport and highways and the auto industry for years.
The draft policy has been released by the government. This means cars on Indian roads will be soon be seen labeled as per their respective fuel efficiencies. The new labeling will help the mileage conscious Indian buyers up to a greater extant by making the choice of new car easier through government certified mileage labels. The standard fuel efficiency labeling will come into operations in next 3 to 4 years.
The proposal however has been receiving mixed reactions across the industry. Recently, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has critiqued the proposal stingingly by claiming that these standards would cause regress in the Indian automobile industry from its so far achieved rate of improvement in fuel efficiency due to high laxity of proposed fuel standards. It stated in a recently issued press release, "In 2010, the Indian car industry had already achieved fuel consumption level of 6 litres per 100 km. But application of the proposed standards to available data for car sales and fuel economy show that the proposed standards are asking the car industry to come down to only 5.73 litre per 100 km in 2015, and to 5.14 litre per 100 km in 2020."
