NEW DELHI: Ahead of winter, when Delhi witnesses severe air pollution, govt is set to roll out a stricter Pollution Under Control Certificate (PUCC) regime. The next generation PUCC 3.0 will use an AI-enabled system to validate the presence of vehicles at test centres, live testing and ensure that the emission-measuring probe is correctly placed for accurate readings, and enable data to be uploaded directly to the central database.Delhi has about 900 PUC test centres and there are around 4,000 in the entire NCR.Speaking at an event, Mahmood Ahmed, an additional secretary in the road transport ministry said the new PUCC regime would be far more stringent, with all data being encrypted end-to-end. TOI has learnt that the new system will automatically capture the registration number of vehicles and there will be automated validation of emission parameters and rejection of suspicious or invalid test records.Mahmood said that they are hopeful of rolling out the PUCC 3.0 in next couple of months and certainly before the onset of winter, The Centre is trying to come out with the notification which would take the pollution control regime to another stage “wherein we would like to say and specify and hopefully ensure too that the vehicles are geotagged, meaning they are in and around the PUCC centre”.Flagging the gap, the official said that most of the vehicles currently don’t even go to the PUC centre and they get a certificate. “We would also like to ensure that the data is end-to-end encrypted. The probe is actually inside the tailpipe of the vehicle and there is no manual feeding of data,” he added.People aware of the next PUC regime said this will prevent any fake device usage, improve reliability and transparency. This also gains importance considering that vehicular pollution in Delhi-NCR is one of the major contributors to air pollution.
