Vehicles more than 15 years old and two-stroke auto rickshaws continue to ply on Kolkata streets. This is despite the high court setting August 1 as the deadline to get such vehicles off the Kolkata Metropolitan Area and the Supreme Court upholding the high court order (see

Transport operators faced a double whammy on Monday with the Supreme Court refusing to give polluting buses and taxis a new lease of life and Calcutta High Court dismissing a petition challenging the decision to junk seized two-stroke autos.

A small, retrofitted LPG kit may make 10,000 two-stroke autos street legal but they will continue to pollute more than the four-stroke ones, warn experts.

- LPG plan activated to let more autos run as real test begins
OUR BUREAU

As the city braces for its first weekday tomorrow since the vehicle pollution ban hit its streets, the government has worked out a plan of

Old out but no sign of new

Calcutta was meant to get cleaner air without compromising on transport but poor planning has ensured that there are no replacements yet for the 70,000 polluting autos and 6,300 taxis going off the road on Saturday.

8-yr window for 2-stroke

Behind closed doors at Writers

After showing the graffiti-scarred city how to keep its walls clean at poll time, Salt Lake seems to be leading the clean-fuel move with around 50 per cent of its two-stroke auto fleet going visibly green.

The government is making a hush-hush move to give two-stroke autos an escape route.

The writ so far, ruled by court pressure, was to scrap all polluting two-stroke autos and allow only four-stroke single-mode LPG ones to ply on city streets.

The high court on Monday directed the government to allow conversion of a two-stroke autorickshaw to battery mode. The private firm doing the switchover would send the three-wheeler to the Automotive Research Association of India to ascertain its feasibility, the court added.