India’s Supreme Court may order some 12,000 public buses off roads in Delhi at the beginning of next month because they emit too much pollution. In 1998, the court ruled that the buses must be converted from diesel to natural gas by the end of March of this year. But the Delhi government, which runs 2,000 of the buses, said yesterday that it would not be able to change over the buses until December, and the private operators that run the other 10,000 buses also seem likely to miss the deadline. The court will give its final decision on requests for an extension on Friday. The slow pokes seem unlikely to get a break — just this Monday, the court strongly criticized the government for not moving quickly enough on the problem.
