Can India really afford cheap cars

IN PRINCIPLE
Can India really afford cheap cars 

MARTIN WRIGHT 


The news that GM India is poised to launch a twolakh car took me back to an incident in Lucknow in March last year. 
I had almost tripped over a scooter lying on its side in the dust, its front wheel still spinning . Moments before it had been carrying a family of four, plus chicken. Now, they were all on the ground, except the chicken which had run away. 
You cant travel long on Indias crowded roads without stumbling on a crash of some sort. This Lucknow family just lost a chicken. About 90,000 people lose their lives on the roads every year and only 5% of them are in cars. 
Hence, of course, the appeal of the one-lakh Nano, and of GMs slightly pricier competitor , promising as they do to put relatively safe motoring within reach of tens of millions of ordinary families. 
Less appealing, of course, is the projected surge in pollution. If these cars sell in anything like the numbers their manufacturers hope, they will catapult India into the premier league of carbon emitters casting doubt on the countrys new-found commitment to tackle global warming. 
Once the climate cost is factored in, theres no such thing as a cheap car. India is acutely vulnerable to climate chaos, and some of the very same people wholl benefit from the Nano will also lose out as wild weather wreaks havoc on the countrys agriculture. 
Does safer, smoother travel for middle-income Indian families have to come at the price of the planet Do we always have to choose between protecting the environment and lifting people out of poverty Not a bit of it. Theres growing evidence that smart innovation can make life sweeter as well as more sustainable. Forwardlooking think tanks like Malini Mehras Centre for Social Markets, or Forum for the Future in the UK, argue that the best hope to win public support in the fight against climate change is to focus on this opportunity agenda . 
So, how could this apply to the Nano Petrol-powered , its a great social revolution, yes but an electric Nano could be all of that and an environmental one, too. It would be ideally suited to the sort of short, urban hops that will constitute the vast majority of its use, so its limited range wouldnt be a problem. It could be recharged by solar power while its owner is at work or even out in the fields. Standing idle, the Nanos battery could trickle power into the grid helping to smooth out the networks notorious instability. 
And the innovation doesnt have to stop there. You might not be able to afford an electric Nano but why own something that you dont use every day So what about a state-sponsored Tata Zero Carbon Car Club, of the sort springing up across European neighbourhoods , giving people the benefits of using a vehicle when they need it, without the hassle and cost of owning one when they dont It could help cut congestion , too: all the evidence suggests that car club members drive less than private car owners because they dont feel they have to justify their hefty investment in their vehicle by using it in preference to the bus or metro. 
But surely all this simply wouldnt be affordable Well, not necessarily not if the government grasped the nettle of subsidy reductions on the one hand, and carbon trading on the other. 
The government spends billions of dollars a year on fuel subsidies effectively making pollution cheap. If some of that went instead to developing 21st century clean transport both personal and mass transit it could bring dividends. After all, as the age of cheap easy oil stutters to a close, investing heavily in fossil-fuelled infrastructure now is about as visionary as sinking your fortune into sailing ships 100 years or so back. 
The dawn of a worldwide carbon market really cant come too soon for India. With its per capita emissions a fraction of those of the West and even China the country could expect to earn billions from selling carbon credits. That could be another source of revenue for cleantech R&D and another source of opportunity for Indian business, as it fights to compete in a low-carbon global economy. 
It all calls for fresh, not to say courageous, thinking always a rarity in politics. But the Nano might help here, albeit in unintended ways. If a swarm of the one lakh miracles slows the pace of the capitals traffic from sluggish to stationary, it might convince even the most sceptical minister that there has, surely , to be a better way. 


The writer is editor-in-chief 
of Green Futures magazine