Cars define urban India. Everyone you know has one and in all the shapes and sizes you can imagine. Like Americans, the urban Indian is in love with his car and is not afraid to show it off to the world. For someone born in India in the 1990s and after, there is probably nothing extraordinary about this. But for those of us who were born in the decades before the 1990s, this is a miracle that unfolded before our eyes. Until the 1970s and well into the 1980s, India was largely a privately owned car-free land.
Senior government officials or public sector companies traveled in their officially provided Ambassadors. So did senior military and police officers whose cars could be identified by their flags and license plates bearing stars (which define the occupant’s status in the organization’s hierarchy). Private cars were owned solely by wealthy city dwellers who had mastered the fine art of running a successful raj licensing business, or by the city’s top doctors or lawyers. The rest of the world used local buses or two-wheelers, preferably scooters of which there were a plethora of brands available: names like Bajaj-Chetak, Lambretta, Vijay-Super, etc. was. Among the cars there were only three brands: the elegant and sporty Ambassador, the ingenious Fiat (also known as Premier Padmani) and the elegant and sporty Standard.
Most people did not really aspire to buy a car, as they knew they would probably never be able to afford it, and in an environment where horse-drawn carriages (tongas) were a common means of transportation within a city, there was no culture of the car to talk. from. The only people who had any kind of passion for automobiles were members of the Indian aristocracy, such as the former maharajas and zaimndars (landowners) and officers who served in the defense forces. For laymen, the Hindi movies were their only exposure to the wacky American cars (Impala) driven in style by movie stars like Rajesh Khanna and Feroze Khan. The boys and girls studying in the main public (private) schools in the many hill towns of India had a lot of information about the events of the automobile world thanks to the western slant of their education. They would look for information from foreign magazines, the main international bestsellers who would read and watch American or British movies (James Bond) with the rhythm of action.
That was how it was until the Maruti Suzuki tsunami hit urban India in the early 1980s. Here was a nifty and fast car powered by a small but surprisingly powerful engine that sped up and hurtled down the roads of Delhi and other cities and towns in India like no car they had ever seen before. The fact that it was small and affordable, offered great performance and mileage, ignited the Indian urban mind to the tempting prospect of owning a car of their own. What started as a trickle turned into a deluge, and the fact that the launch of the Maruti 800 coincided with the opening of the hitherto moribund Indian economy to the free flow of world trade that spawned a gigantic Indian middle class of aspiring professionals. and spare parts money fueled this unprecedented growth. Unlike their parents, this new generation of young professionals had no aversion to risk and did not think of borrowing from banks and other financial institutions to finance their purchase. This easy availability of finance was itself a result of the hectic pace at which the Indian economy was trying to replicate what was happening in the major Western countries of the time.
Today, India is one of the largest car markets in the world, with virtually every brand in the world sold here. Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, Toyota Lexus, Volks Wagon, Skoda, Toyota, they are all here. One of our homegrown car giants, Tata Motors owns the British brand Jaguar-Land Rover, and Greater Noida, near Delhi, is home to the Formual 1 Grand Prix circuit of India. The transformation that appears is complete.
Not quite. Despite being one of the most important car markets in the world, India ranks fairly low on most human development indices, averaging 150 out of some 200 countries. There is still abysmal poverty, appalling education and health care deficiencies, creaky and inefficient infrastructure, endemic corruption, and a myriad of other evils. While the country makes admirable progress in all of these spheres, it is definitely not out of the woods and trying to recreate the American car obsession here will have mixed results. While the growth of the automotive industry in India has been enormous and has generated a lot of jobs and income, the impact in terms of environmental costs and the burden on the clearly inadequate roads in our cities has been nothing short of a catastrophe.
The countries of the North American continent are blessed with large land masses with relatively sparse populations. India may be a large country, but its cities, towns, and other urban centers are in tatters. Things cannot be like the US or Canada, where large numbers of people can think of having two cars and a large suburban home (recent financial woes make it a bit difficult). Instead, India needs to look at countries like the UK and Singapore, where there are embargoes on the use of private cars. In countries like the Netherlands, a large number of people commute to work on bicycles. Everything has taken a complete turn in India and perhaps it is time to rethink the national urban obsession with cars.