[sustran] FW: Article: On Cheaper Cars In India

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Sat Apr 1 03:59:47 JST 2006


 
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ZNet | India
On Cheaper Cars in India
by Girish Mishra; March 30, 2006
The finance minister, P. Chidambaram, has proposed to reduce excise duty on
cars from 24 to 16 per cent, i.e., by one third. He hopes: "industry will
seize the opportunity to make India hub for the manufacture of small and
fuel-efficient cars." It is needless to add that this proposal intends to
encourage foreign direct investment in the automobile sector, which is at
present controlled largely by the foreigners and induce the neo-rich to buy
their own vehicles. This will ultimately lead to further worsening of the
public transport system, which will be used largely by the lower rungs of
the society whose voice, except the election times, does not count for
policy-makers.

Passenger cars manufactured here are not such that can be easily sold in the
world market to fetch foreign exchange resources to help promote India's
industrial development. They are meant for the domestic market. This clearly
understood by the policy makers in the government as well as the foreign
investors. In a developing economy like India, certain things need to be
borne in mind while encouraging the production of goods and services.
First, they should, as far as possible, satisfy the needs of a large number
of people. Second, if the government has to choose between the satisfaction
of the needs of a small number of people and an overwhelmingly larger
segment of the society, the decision should be in the favour of the latter.
Third, the production of those goods and services should be increased, whose
augmented quantum would be sufficiently large and divisible to go round.

>From these principles, it follows, to quote the late Paul Sweezy, in a
developing country like India, "There should be no production automobiles,
household appliances, or other consumer durable goods for private sale and
use. The reason is simple that to turn out enough such products to go around
would require many years, perhaps even many decades, and they are
distributed privately in the mean time the result can only be to create or
aggravate material inequalities. The appropriate . policy is therefore to
produce these types of goods in forms and quantities best suited to the
collective satisfaction of needs: car pools, communal cooking and eating
establishments, apartment . houses or neighbourhood laundries, and so on."
This will lead to a more rational pattern of production.

Encouraging the production of passenger cars for domestic consumption,
besides adversely affecting the volume and tempo of accumulation, is bound
to add a new dimension to aggravating material inequalities. People having
their own private means of conveyance are bound to develop their own
distinctive way of life. To quote Sweezy again, "The automobile increasingly
dominates their use of leisure (after work, weekends, vacations) and thus
indirectly generates a whole new set of needs. the allocation of vast
quantities of human and material resources of private consumer durable goods
and their complementary facilities means neglecting or holding back the
development of other sectors of the economy and society. Or to put the
matter more bluntly: a society which decides not to make the raising of mass
living standards the number one priority."    

Cars are, by their very nature, luxury goods invented for the exclusive
enjoyment of a handful of the rich and they are unlike radio, television,
bicycle, refrigerator, etc., which retain their attraction even when they
are owned by most of the people. French publicist Michel Bosquet is right
when he says, "The motor car is only interesting and advantageous so long as
the mass of people do not own it, in the same way as a villa on the coast.
The car is a luxury product by definition, because of the market for which
it was originally conceived and luxury, also by definition, cannot be
democratised. If luxury is within everyone's reach, nobody gets any
advantage from it; on the contrary, everyone hustles, frustrates and
dispossesses everyone else, and suffers these things at the hands of
others."

A car may give personal benefits to a handful of people, but at a huge
social cost. It occupies scarce space in towns and cities in a country like
India. Parking has become a big problem and, quite often, there are violent
disputes. Car deprives other road-users like bicycle riders and pedestrians
safe travel. In India, most car owners do not care for traffic rules and
they try to overtake other modes of transportation and indulge in rash
driving. Quite often, the poor and homeless sleeping on the pavements become
their victims. Drinking and driving are seldom kept separate and the corrupt
police do not care to bring the culprits to books.
Encouragement to the MNCs to set up car manufacturing in India by giving
them tax concessions and the cheaper loans to prospective consumers to
create the demand are bound to ignite a desire in every individual to
possess a car so that "he can prevail and advance himself at everyone's
expense. The brutal, competitive egotism of the driver symbolically
murdering the 'individual' obstructing the headlong passage through the
traffic represents the flowering of universally bourgeois behaviour."

The myth that motoring is a pleasure has adversely affected the development
of public transport because the rich and influential have no interest in the
latter. Road development and its use and town planning are oriented to suit
car users.

Looking back, one realizes that motorcar came into existence to give their
owners the privilege of travelling much faster and at will than others.
Looking at the situation in Indian cities and their suburbs, this hope is
beyond realization. The increasing number of private cars and the distances
to be travelled from the homes in suburbs to and fro the places of work have
traffic jams a regular occurrence costing a great deal of time and money on
fuel and maintenance. Besides, car drivers are under great mental strain.
Studies conducted in the West reveal: "when everyone tries to move at the
privileged speed. the result is that nobody can move out at all, the speed
of the urban traffic falls to below that of a horse-drawn omnibus. and the
average speed of traffic on roads out of town at weekends is lower than the
speed of a cyclist. And the condition is incurable: every remedy has been
tried and the end result is that things continue to get worse. Radial and
ring roads, flyover junctions, sixteen-lane toll highways, all lead to the
same result: the more roads there are servicing a town, the more traffic
flows into it, and the more paralyzing the urban congestion becomes. The
problem will remain insoluble as long as towns exist; however wide and fast
a motorway is, the speed at which vehicles can leave it is limited by the
rate at which they can be absorbed into the urban network."

In the US, one has to choose between the car and the towns. The latter may
be eliminated by spreading them out along hundreds of miles of highways.
This solution is not feasible in India. Commenting on this experiment, Ivan
Illich, in Energy and Equity, says, "The American man devotes more than
fifteen hundreds hours a year- i.e., thirty hours a week or more than four
hours a day including Sunday-to his car. This includes the time he spends
behind the wheel, moving or stationary, the hours of work needed to pay for
the car, and to pay for petrol, tyres, road tolls, insurance, fines, etc. .
Thus this American takes fifteen hundred hours to travel 6,250 miles, an
average of about 4 miles an hour. In other countries, which lack a transport
industry, people travel on foot at exactly the same speed, with the added
advantage that they can go anywhere at all, not just along asphalted roads."

Bosquet has reached the same conclusion: the more a society uses
privately-owned cars, after a certain threshold is reached, the more time
its people have to spend or waste on moving about.
Till the end of the Second World War, urban areas were worth living, but
today the increasing number of cars and other motor vehicles have rendered
them so smelly, noisy, toxic, dusty and crowded that the rich want to live
away in suburbs.

India must draw proper lessons from the experiences of the West without
succumbing to the pressures and allurements from the MNCs. It should give
topmost priority to the expansion and development of a reliable and
comfortable public transport system. Wherever cars are needed, there should
be a pool from which one can hire. The question is: will the MNCs allow the
vast Indian market slip out of their hands? Did not the other day President
Bush told it plainly that the 300-million middle class people with growing
disposable income could not be ignored? It is for the Government of India to
decide whether it cares for the interests of the 300-million or those of the
700-million plus people who urgently need 'development with dignity'. 
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