On
Cheaper Cars In India
By Girish Mishra
31 March, 2006
Zmag
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’.