The Karnataka high court has issued notices to the state and Centre on a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking to keep vehicles that are more than 15 years old off the road so as to avoid pollution and accidents. According to the pil filed by advocate M G Kumar, the petitioner, on March 31, 1999 in Bangalore there were as many as 1,230,173 old motor vehicles on Bangalore's roads and together they were daily spewing 650 tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere. In his petition, Kumar contended that the law had to be strictly enforced to remove these old and polluting vehicles as they are posing a hazard to public health.