[sustran] Urgent help needed by CSE on its diesel campaign

[SUSTRAN Resource Centre]

BOUNCE sustran-discuss at jca.ax.apc.org:    Non-member submission from
["SUNITA NARAIN" <sunita at cseindia.org>]   


Dear Roger and friends at Sustran
You are going to be inundated with messages of help from us. 
Thank you very much for writing to us when our case against 
TELCO was raging. Sorry for not replying earlier but things have 
been difficult. 

As you know we have been pushing Indian car manufacturers to 
get out of using diesel (which is kept cheap in India to subsidise 
public transport and agriculture). TELCO -- the key Indian 
manufacturer had filed a US$ 25 million case against us. They 
withdrew the case three weeks later saying that they never meant 
it. The details are on our site (cseindia.org). Last month we also 
organised the top medical community to issue a statement on the 
impact of diesel emissions on health. This has been widely 
received (the statement and pictures of lungs of a person living in 
clean rural India and Delhi are also on our site). We have also 
published a detailed monograph on the issue of dieselisation of 
private vehicles which can also be downloaded from our site.

We are getting a lot of public support and will be taking this issue 
to the Supreme Court of India as well. We have already got the 
court to order an advancement of standards -- Euro II standards 
have been advanced by 5 years -- but now we will be asking for a 
ban on private diesel cars. The Court has already ordered that all 
public transport in Delhi has to move to CNG and other clean fuels 
by March 2001. 

We now need your help, in particular, to put pressure on the 
multinational car companies -- Ford, Mercedes Benz, General 
Motors and Toyota -- who are launching a number of new cars 
running on diesel in India. As my colleague, Sandhya Sharma, has 
written in an email that she sent to all of you, we are finding that 
multinational car companies operating in India just do not want to 
accept diesel as a public health issue. All these companies -- we 
have just interviewed their CEO's -- insist that diesel is a "green 
fuel". We have done a strong (possibly libellous) article on these 
companies and the response of their CEOs. This is published in 
the latest issue of our magazine, Down To Earth and will be on our 
site in a day or so. 

We need your help to put pressure on these companies to stop 
selling diesel cars in Delhi -- which already has RSPM levels that 
are 5-6 times the WHO standard and is literally choking on 
particulate emissions. 

Please let us know what you can do. We need to move fast as the 
Supreme Court will be listening to the case again in 10-15 days 
and we would like to put pressure on these companies and have a 
public campaign.

We look forward to hearing from you. Sandhya's email has got 
further details.

With warm regards
Sunita Narain


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