hief Minister Rekha Gupta recently called for permanent and stricter implementation of Delhi’s ‘No PUC, No Fuel’ rule. The numbers that followed were striking. Over 15,000 vehicles were denied fuel across the city for not carrying a valid Pollution Under Control (PUC) certificate, within four days of the drive from April 26 to 29. Fuel pumps in Delhi are now linked to centralised databases and equipped with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras. The system can verify a vehicle’s PUC status in real time and issue e-Challans.
The reach this creates would have been difficult to imagine even five years ago.
The intent is right. Vehicular emissions are a dominating contributor to Delhi’s air quality crisis and strict action is needed to tackle these. Measures like ‘No PUC, No Fuel’ can be effective in ensuring that vehicles hold a valid PUC certificate; they are far less equipped to answer whether the certificate reflects a meaningful test at all.
As enforcement becomes permanent, it raises an important question: what exactly are we enforcing? The PUC certificate has been the backbone of India’s in-use vehicle emissions regime since the early 1990s. The test primarily measures Carbon Monoxide (CO) and Hydrocarbons (HC), and smoke opacity for diesel vehicles. That was reasonable for the fleet size and emissions standards of that era. The problem is that what drives Delhi’s AQI today is not CO or HC, but fine particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10). These fine particles remain suspended in the air for longer periods and penetrate deep into our lungs. WHO has repeatedly flagged these as the dominant health risk from urban air pollution. And the PUC test, the instrument at the centre of India’s vehicular emissions enforcement architecture, does not measure them. This is a central design limitation of the system as it currently operates.