Delhi government has begun the survey to count cars in the capital. The survey started in Lajpat Nagar where a large number of cars were found to have moved away from the location of the registered purchase.
Out of 2,841 addresses at which cars had been registered that transport department surveyors visited, 52 had the vehicles parked there, nine were out on the roads, while 381 had been scrapped. One had been impounded, three wrecked, 16 stolen and 683 cars had been sold.
While the status of these 1,145 cars was determined, the surveyors did not find any information on 1,130 vehicle owners. A senior government official said these involved people who had shifted from the locality. “They may have been living on rent and shifted to other places,” the official said. The team found 434 cases in which the people were unwilling to disclose any information about their vehicles. In 132 cases, the registered address in Lajpat Nagar could not be located.
“The initial trend of the survey indicates that the number of vehicles running on the road is far less than what is projected. This is because we saw that instead of deregistering their vehicle, a lot of people moved their vehicles to another state,” the official added. “In total, therefore, of the 2,841 houses that our team visited, 1,696 were those in which the vehicles registered in that address were untraceable.” Many of the vehicle owners had also moved to other addresses or sent their cars, possibly through sales, to other states.
According to the Economic Survey of Delhi, the number of motor vehicles on the city roads in 2021-22 was 79.2 lakh, a 35.4% decrease after Delhi government banned diesel vehicles aged over 10 years and petrol vehicles older than 15 years old.
The car count is an ongoing survey and the transport department plans to carry out a pan-Delhi determination of the number of cars. Also, only the houses in whose addresses the vehicles were registered were visited.
Another official said that the finding that 683 people had scrapped their vehicles was an encouraging trend and the number could rise in the coming days due to the transport department’s ongoing drive against overage cars. The transport department has seized over 3,000 vehicles that had reached the end of their legal life, acting against aged vehicles both in use and those parked in public places.
The National Green Tribunal has banned all diesel vehicles over 10 years old and petrol vehicles over 15 years old from plying on Delhi roads, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court. On March 29, the transport department launched a drive to impound vehicles that had surpassed their life and sent them for scrapping.
