A Volkswagen Group India spokesperson said the company would challenge the order in the Supreme Court.
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THE NATIONAL Green Tribunal (NGT) on Thursday ordered Volkswagen to pay a fine of Rs 500 crore for causing damage to the environment by programming its diesel engines with cheat devices.
A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel directed the German global auto giant to deposit the amount within two months.
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The NGT panel was formed in November last year in the wake of the 2015 global emission scandal or ‘Dieselgate’ when the company was found guilty of intentionally programming its diesel engines with cheat devices to meet US regulatory standards but actually emit up to 40 times more Nitrous Oxides (NOx) in real-world conditions.
The panel, which used Delhi as the base city to calculate the damages, estimated that Volkswagen cars released approximately 48.678 tonnes of NOx in 2016. The penalty was determined on the basis of the 3.27 lakh Volkswagen cars that had deceit software installed in India.
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The report was filed on orders passed by the NGT on November 16, 2018, when it had directed Volkswagen to deposit Rs 100 crore with the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) as “an interim measure”.
While passing the order, the NGT had observed that the “polluter pays principle has been accepted as part of the law of the land” and since “serious damage has been caused to the environment”, this principle “needs to be invoked to compensate the damage” caused.
“Remediation of the damaged environment is part of the process of sustainable development and, as such, polluter is liable to pay the cost to the individual sufferers as well as the cost of reversing the damaged ecology,” the NGT had said.
The NGT had passed the order on a plea filed by Advocate Sanjeev Ailawadi after ‘Dieselgate’.
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The Rs 500 crore fine is the latest blow to Volkswagen, which is facing both criminal and civil penalties for installing illegal software to cheat strict US pollution norms. In the US and Canada, where proceedings are pending, the company has agreed to pay $2.8 billion to an environmental trust. The NGT, in its order, had said: “It also pleaded guilty to three federal criminal felony counts and paid USD 2.8 billion criminal penalty.”
In India, the expert panel constituted by the NGT said that “only human health damages are being considered for estimation”. Referring to the Rs 171.34 crore fine, the panel had said that “this value may be considered as conservative due to lack of methodologies for calculating the overall impact of NOx on the environment in India and hence only health damages are valued”.
Kaunain Sheriff M is an award-winning investigative journalist and the National Health Editor at The Indian Express. He is the author of Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant, an investigation into one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies.
With over a decade of experience, Kaunain brings deep expertise in three areas of investigative journalism: law, health, and data. He currently leads The Indian Express newsroom’s in-depth coverage of health.
His work has earned some of the most prestigious honours in journalism, including the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award, and the Mumbai Press Club’s Red Ink Award.
Kaunain has also collaborated on major global investigations. He was part of the Implant Files project with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which exposed malpractices in the medical device industry across the world. He also contributed to an international investigation that uncovered how a Chinese big-data firm was monitoring thousands of prominent Indian individuals and institutions in real time.
Over the years, he has reported on several high-profile criminal trials, including the Hashimpura massacre, the 2G spectrum scam, and the coal block allocation case. Within The Indian Express, he has been honoured three times with the Indian Express Excellence Award for his investigations—on the anti-Sikh riots, the Vyapam exam scam, and the abuse of the National Security Act in Uttar Pradesh. ... Read More
