All I can say is, its about time! Although Cal has come a LONG way compared to 7-8 years ago, the air pollution is still severe, as I saw on a trip there in January. Compare this to Chandigarh, which mandated several years ago that all vehicles switch to 'green fuel' -- and the difference is amazing. I never thought driving with the windows rolled down would be such a pleasant experience.

Now if they can only do something about the horrible congestion, and the even more atrocious driving behavior (downright chaotic at best) I've seen all over India, that would be real progress.

I heard about this proposal years ago, but I never thought it would happen. Kudos to them. Now if they can only pass some traffic laws....

By the way, it's Kolkata now.

"By the way, it's Kolkata now."

Sorry, but I'm going to stick to the old spelling. Bombay to Mumbai was bad enough, but there you could make the case that Mumbai was the Marathi name. Here, it is just for pronunciation purposes that the local Reds felt the need to change the name.

I am glad the soot pumping machings are getting banned, however, has the government of businesses invested in infrastructure for LNG/CNG?

My family in India had one of their cars converted to LNG. It works well, though lately there have been issues with obtaining enough LNG/CNG to keep things economical.

Unless heavy investments are made in obtaining and distributing natural gases, these moves will be costly for the economy to bear.

India is looking to gas sources such as Qatar, Iran, Central Asia, and Russia, but knowing how bureaucracy functions there it would be eons before substantial gains are made to feed a population so large.

Bangla Warrior,

The name change for Calcutta/Kolkata is a complictaed issue on indentity grounds of themselves, but the broader political context is disturbing:

However, in response to the name changes in West Bengal, the BJP has proposed some name changes of its own. The obvious choice, paralleling the restoring of Bengali pronunciation to the name Kolkata, would be to rename Delhi as Dilli, to match Hindi pronunciation. However, the proposal has been to rename Delhi as Indraprastha, which was the name of the capital city of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, one of the two great Hindu epics. There was in fact an ancient town named Indraprastha on the site of modern New Delhi, but the name Delhi, or a variant of it, has been used in all languages since the medieval period.19 It is unclear where the name came from, but Indraprastha has never been more than just one region of the city. In fact, the Sikh population of the city has circulated a petition to rename Indraprastha University as "Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University", to commemorate Sikh history and make up for anti-Sikh riots in 1984.20

Even more controversial is the attempt to rename Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat. Ahmedabad was named after Ahmed Shah the Muslim prince who founded the city in 1411. However, in 1991, the BJP-led municipal corporation attempted to rename the city as Karnavati, but was prevented by the INC-led national government. Their justification was that the Hindu ruler Karna Deva actually founded the city in the 11th century on territory taken from the tribal chief Ahsa Bhil, and that Ahmed Shah founded his city on the same territory.21 The city and state both have large Muslim populations, much of which is located in the nearby town of Gandhinagar, the state capital. The recent renaming of Kolkata has brought the issue back to the fore in BJP politics in Gujarat. However, the Home Minister L.K. Advani, whose decision is important in this issue, is the parliamentary representative of Ghandinagar, and has thus far avoided the issue in order to prevent conflict within his own constituency.22 Since the Bhili tribal group has asked to have the city named after Ahsa Bhil, and the BJP has ignored their claims, the BJP will most likely not have the strength to force this issue in the near future.23

Thus, the BJP seeks to take the pattern of renaming a city with an ancient name to replace a British colonial corruption, and use it to rename cities built by Muslims in Medieval times. There are even suggestions by some that the country should be renamed Bharat after characters in several ancient epics, rather than India, which (like Hindi, Hindu, Sindh, and Hindustan) is etymologically linked to the Indus river, which is now in Pakistan.24 This ploy of various regional governments to assert their own power against the INC may thus be turned around by the BJP to impose Hindu fundamentalism and Hindi language on multicultural India. While the BJP and Shiv Sena claim that their philosophy of Hindutva is meant to represent Indian nationalism, and not religious ideology, their actions have clearly not reflected this. By renaming Bombay as Mumbai, they effectively declared that the city belonged to the native Kolis and Marathas. However, the city's current economic prominence depended also upon Gujarati Muslim rule, Portuguese and British ports, Konkani refugees from Portuguese Goa, and Parsi merchants attracted by this multicultural setting.25

Not saying you shouldn't use the new name, but it's worth giving some thought to whether to participate in what was coopted to be a Hindutva-led national project. If you choose not to, you can take more other steps closer to home like using "bangali" instead of "bengali", "bangla" instead of "bengali", bitching out people who say "southeast asian" instead of "south asian", or people who think that desi is equivalent to indian and doesn't include pakistanis, bangladeshis, nepalis, and others who self-identify as such (and bombard us with Hindi constantly).

This is an issue that's close to home for me, because a relative (younger than me) in calcutta has thoracic (i think?) cancer and my family has been speculating as to why he and so many others would get cancer at such an early age.

Even given that, though, this approach:

Authorities in the Indian city of Calcutta have ordered all vehicles manufactured before 1990 off the roads unless they convert to green fuel...by the end of the year.

makes me uncomfortable. It sounds very unnuanced (seven months to change all the vehicles?) There are other issues at play here (like who owns older autos and taxis and the such) that I don't know enough about to comment on. I can't imagine that the drivers do in most cases, but I'm worried about attempted solutions to social problems that aren't rooted in taking into account all of the factors or the economic costs being carried down to punish the drivers (like higher lease rates or whatever). I'm not saying that's definitely what happened here, but I would be concerned based on what little I know from that article.

God, I wish the government would do something similar in Karachi. It's bad enough that when I go to work in the early afternoon, I can't actually see the skyline or even the horizon, just a thick grey cloud of smog.

Bravo, I say!

I realize it may not be the most equitable solution in the world, but the situation is just so terrible it almost doesn't matter. Everyone benefits from cleaner air. And someone might consider going into business providing the necessary conversion.

And someone might consider going into business providing the necessary conversion.

From my information on Gujarat...

Several businesses already exist doing this type of work. The conversion kits are relatively simple. Even before LNG (CNG was legal for sometime) was legalized people were doing this. Essentially market forces dictated either the Government legalize it or all cooking gas cylinders would be running around in cars.

This was creating competing demands and people who could afford to use butane based LPG were hoarding more for their cars.

Now that it is legal, the Govt specifically seperated cooking LPG and car LPG. Problem is, not enough car LPG to go around. Since the govt has such a stranglehold on infrastructure the process is becoming more expensive thereby negating why people went to LPG in the first place: COST.

When people used cooking gas cylinders, the cost was much lower. With automobile specific LPG, the costs are becoming the same as petroleum which always has been pretty expensive in India.

Govt. of India needs SERIOUS investments in distributing LPG and CNG (compressed natural gas, methane based that is more cumbersome and less fuel quantity wise).

IN all my travels throughout India I found the provinvial towns in Maharashtra to be the cleanest, most orderly and civilized (law and order wise). The caveat is that I haven't been to Gujarat, Kashmir, Himachal, the North East and Bihar (ok that was overkill).