New Delhi, May 31 (IANS) The National Green Tribunal on Tuesday directed ten states to provide the number of diesel vehicles plying in the country's 15 most polluted cities.

Hearing a case to extend a Supreme Court-mandated ban on diesel vehicles more than 10 years old or more than 2,000 cc capacity, the tribunal's principal bench, headed by Justice (retd.) Swantater Kumar asked the chief secretaries of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Punjab to submit these details at earliest.

The 15 most polluted cities identified in a new list by the Central Pollution Control Board are Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Patna, Lucknow, Allahabad, Kanpur, Varanasi, Nagpur, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Amritsar and Pune.