It’s been a crazy few days for this blog. The announcement by Tata of the launch of its Nano, the Rs. 1 lakh ($2,500) “People’s Car” designed to bring automobile ownership to India’s masses, gave my old essay, India: Going Nowhere Fast, a new currency; and this blog has received more than 1,300 hits in the last three days.
Posts Tagged 'Tata Nano'
Driven to Write
Published 14 January 2008 Blogs & Blogging , India , Media , Politics & Policy , Science & Technology 2 CommentsTags: 1 lakh car, blogging, development, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, people's car, Tata, Tata Nano
India: Going Nowhere Fast
Published 12 October 2007 Art & Culture , Environment , India , Science & Technology 50 CommentsTags: auto industry, automobile, Bangalore, business, cars, cheap car, consumerism, Delhi, dystopia, Environment, Gurgaon, India, infrastructure, Maruti, Maruti Suzuki, materialism, Noida, planning, Pune, regional planning, selfishness, social values, Tata, Tata Nano, urban planning
A story about India’s booming auto industry leads today’s New York Times business section. “Ask a billion people, and 99 percent of them are going to say they want a car,” explains Jagdish Khattar, managing director of Maruti Suzuki India, the country’s largest car manufacturer. “The problem,” he continues, “is: How many can afford it?”
And so Maruti Suzuki, and the other Indian automakers are cranking out inexpensive cars by the lakhs. Car sales within India will reach nearly two million units this year, and are estimated to climb to nearly four million by 2013.
Most tout this kind of industrial muscle and burgeoning consumer acquisitiveness as signs of a brilliantly expansive, vital economy. I see it as further evidence – as if more was needed – that India is a second-rate country with first-rate promise, limited by third-rate imagination and fourth-rate fidelity to the values and traditions of its proud past.
Put another way: India is squandering its Twenty First Century economic opportunity with its mid-Twentieth Century mindset.
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