Kathmandu, August 26

It has been almost a year since the government decided to take vehicles that are more than 20 years old off the road. However, finding old vehicles plying the roads carrying passengers more than theircapacity and creating airpollution is not a new scene in Kathmandu Valley.

A Cabinet meeting on September 11 last year had taken a decision to remove public vehicles that are more than 20 years old. And, the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport (MoPIT), in October, had instructed the Department of Transport (DoTM) to send old vehicles of Bagmati zone to the scrap yard within two years and start fixing a 20-year operation life of new public vehicles in their bill books while the vehicles are being registered in all zones.

Despite free movement of such old vehicles, the government is least bothered to conduct any monitoring. So far, owners of only around five public vehicles have scrapped their vehicles in Bagmati zone.

After realising that the regional transport management offices have not been fixing the ‘life’ of new vehicles mandatorily based on the new provision, DoTM has also issued a circulation to mention maximum operation period of 20 years in bill books of new vehicles.

“There is no effective monitoring mechanism, because of which old vehicles are being operated endangering the lives of passengers,” said a DoTM official. The government should prepare a list of old vehicles from the registration data and instruct Traffic Police to conduct monitoring so that transporters start scrapping their old vehicles, the official said.

In a bid to enforce the provision of sending old vehicles to the scrap yard officially, the MoPIT had published a notice in the Nepal Gazette on March 5 this year. This means that around 15,000 old vehicles have to be scrapped within March 5, 2017. MoPIT said that the decision to remove old vehicles and fix operation period of new vehicles had received less importance due to the negligence of DoTM and regional offices.

Studies and road accident records have revealed that vehicles that have been in operation for more than 20 years possess a huge risk of accidents and are also a major reason behind air pollution. There are an estimated 15,000 such old vehicles (buses, mini buses, tempos, green plated tourist vehicles, trucks and taxis) in Bagmati zone.

As a facility to transporters losing their vehicles, the government had also decided to allow owners to import new vehicles after scrapping the old ones and permit them to operate in the same route where the old vehicles are operating at present. After the publication of the notice in the Gazette, transporters were also provided three months by the DoTM to transfer ownership of old vehicles, if required and confirm the real owners before sending old vehicles to scrap.