When I arrived here in Beijing, this year, I found it quite comparable to Delhi when it comes to traffic vows but as regards pollution levels china tops the charts. Anyone who has stayed in New Delhi over a decade knows that living in Delhi was the equivalent of unwillingly smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, not only you could see the pollution but as well could smell and taste it! Now it’s a complete different story, a profound change. Thanks to compressed natural gas (CNG) blessing the Capital.

Considering that Beijing has been accelerating the additions of its cars at the rate of about 1,000 per day and the consequent rise in its pollution, its no wonder that international Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge has warned that some Olympic competitions might be postponed if the city did not clean up the air.  Seems like Olympics have shouted out loud at the authorities telling them if u cant fix it, forget it.

So Beijing comes out with the ban on cars and it’s been a bliss for commuters for 4 days in Beijing. Home was within a 15 minute reach whereas it took 4o minutes for the same distance! To those who didn’t know, there was a four-day ban from 17th August onwards which used an odd-even license plate number system, on the odd number day the even number car stays parked. The system was intended to take 1.3 million cars off the road every day - more than a third of the city’s 3 million vehicles.

The metro stations and buses were congested and taxis wallas (a Hindi word for cabbies) made some big money with houseful of customers.

But the results did’nt show a great difference in the smoke and smog levels as four days was pretty short to consider the variations and not sure if this is going to be implemented for the entire period of Olympics next year.

And when I was just thinking of writing on the Blog: “is Beijing going to learn from Delhi?” and argue whether Beijing can implement the CNG system as Delhi has had in operation since many years now, bringing remarkable improvements in the air that people could finally breathe. I came across the news item that’s this is already in pipeline and who’s assisting it to reduce the pollution levels – Yes, its India!!

China had decided in 2005 to introduce CNG in Beijing for converting entire transport vehicles by 2008, before commencement of the Olympics. Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL) is playing a crucial role in converting the mass transportation system of Beijing to CNG before the Olympics to be held in 2008. GAIL hopes to bring down vehicular pollution levels significantly through this project as it did in Delhi and Mumbai.

The projects have been executed by JVs between GAIL and China Gas Holding Limited. On June 26, 2007 they entered  into a 50:50 Joint Venture Agreement (JVA) for pursuing gas sector business opportunities (picture above). The agreement was signed by Mr. R. K. Goel, Director (Finance), GAIL and Mr. Liu Ming Hui, Managing Director, China Gas. 

What was the Delhi -CNG story?

It all started with a public interest litigation by the Centre of Science and Environment in 1996 that resulted in a series of Supreme Court orders. The objective was to expand the city’s public transport system and also to control pollution. 

The Supreme court having its seat in the Capital decided on the conversion of entire public transport fleet converted to CNG on a scale unparalleled anywhere else—80,000 CNG vehicles including 10,000 buses. On July 28, 1998, in an unprecedented development, the Supreme Court (SC) ruled that the total passenger bus fleet of Delhi be increased from the then figure of about 6,000 to 10,000 by April 1,2001 and the entire city bus fleet be converted to CNG.

Autorickshaws were the first to convert once the government offered sales tax exemptions. And later Delhi banned taxis, buses and auto rickshaws older than 15 years. Much progress has been made in this field. Today, there are 110 CNG stations in Delhi and 3,100 buses use CNG, making it the largest fleet in the world.

Entire process can be sumarised as follows:

April 1998: Introduction of CNG buses in Delhi

Sept 1998: Complete removal of lead in petrol

Dec 1998: Restrict plying of goods vehicles during the day

Sept 1999: Amendment of Motor Vehicles Act to include CNG

April 2000: Private vehicles to be registered only if they conform to Euro II standards

April 2000: Eight-year-old commercial vehicles phased out

Nov 2002: Conversion of all public transport buses to CNG

Thus one main difference between the two countries in its approach to lowering pollution levels is that while China needed Olympics to gear them for CNG run vehicles, it was the Delhites (The public of Delhi) and the public authorities who turned the cause into action.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Government, Business, Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.