In the meantime, if the Delhi transport minister Parvez Hashmi is asking for more time from the Supreme Court to implement the court order then he must give a personal undertaking to implement the order.

NEW DELHI January 12, 2001: Ever since an increasing number of CNG-driven autos have started coming on the roads, a strange whisper campaign has been brewing in the air – that CNG causes cancer. We first got the wind of it when several employees of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), heard auto drivers discussing this during their daily commuting. What at first we thought were stray comments turned out to be a raging rumour. CSE began to get queries from all round – colleagues, friends, and the general public. That is when we decided to get it investigated.

CSE organised a rapid survey to confirm if it was really true, and surveyed about 207 autorickshaw drivers across the city in -- Hamdard Nagar, Batra Hospital, Civil Lines, Mall Road, New Delhi Railway Station, ITO, ISBT, Delhi University, GTB Nagar, and Connaught Place.

CSE was shocked to find out that the rumour was spreading like wildfire. More than half of them had heard that CNG causes cancer. To the extent that many of those surveyed thought that the CNG drive would end soon as it caused cancer. "CNG is more dangerous than petrol, it emits gas which mixes in the air and causes cancer and this is what doctors say, then what is the necessity to switch to CNG vehicles," says Guddu, an autorickshaw driver.

Where is it coming from? The word spread quite effectively through the cohesive and active network of auto rickshaw drivers. Not surprisingly all of them have heard about it from "some friend" or "another auto-driver". None of them could authenticate this hearsay with a newspaper report or any organisation. But, quite a few of the drivers have referred to a case filed by Apollo hospital to stop usage of CNG because it causes cancer. CSE immediately got in touch with Apollo to find out if this was true. Apollo Hospital confirmed that there was no such case. Some of the drivers even talked about CNG related cancer deaths in some government hospitals recently.

CSE even surveyed a smaller group of taxi drivers, about 30 of them, to confirm whether they had heard the rumour. Each and every one of those surveyed had heard the rumour on cancer and CNG, while none of them have ever heard about the carcinogenic potential of diesel fumes.

Clearly, such whisper campaigns have been engineered to undermine the steps that the Supreme Court has taken to clean up the city’s air. CSE is disappointed at the Delhi government lacklustre response to the court orders. The government has made no attempt to inform the people about the need and the merit of moving to CNG, and to educate target groups, such as autorickshaw drivers, who would implement the order.

International experience shows that moving to any new fuel is always beset with hurdles, such as the opposition from the entrenched business interests. But the available information from the west show that their governments have taken very strong proactive approaches in order to counterattack such opposition, and raise public awareness. A notable example is the public notification that was issued by the US Department of Energy to separate myths from facts about CNG when similar attacks were hurdled at it in the US. In fact, to counter what it calls ‘industry folklore’, the US Department of Energy issued the notification, entitled ‘Natural Gas Buses: Separating Myth from Fact’, in April 2000. The release deals with every issue that is confusing Delhi’s decision-makers: cost, effect on global warming, safety, and health effects of nanoparticles or ultra-fine particles from CNG. "It becomes very difficult for fleet operators to evaluate the benefits of an alternative fuel program if they are confronted with misinformation or poor comparisons based on false assumptions," states the US government release.

It is time that the Delhi government also learnt its lessons fast and restored the confidence of CNG vehicles operators to deflate the whisper campaign.

If the government had been sincere about implementing the court order of moving all buses, auto rickshaws and taxis to CNG as scheduled then we would have been able to avoid as much as 15,617 tonnes of additional particulate pollution over the next 10 years – equal to 3 years of pollution at the current level. Even more important this would save 7880 extra deaths– more than 2 extra deaths a day over the next 10 years. These are the results from the CSE study estimating pollution load from vehicles in Delhi.

It is equally important to inform people that diesel and NOT CNG triggers cancer. If only particulate emissions are compared from different car models then the cancerous effect of diesel particulate matter from a new diesel Euro I car is equal to that of 24 new petrol cars and 81 compressed natural gas cars on roads.