After a long pitched battle and a welter of confusion, it seems the little ram has come to roll on the potty streets of India tomtomming as the sign of development.
The little ram is christened as ‘Nano’. But what nano actually means has got nothing to do with our little ram rolling on the streets. Neither it explains for whom the is aimed at. When millions of people of India languish in everyday drudgery, what will the little ram do any precious good to them to uplift their plights? There is no answer forthcoming from the developmentwallas.
Once in America it was said that “What is good for the General Motors is good for America.” In the same way what is good for the Indian public is good for the TATA Motors. So, most interestingly the interests coincide or rather are made to coincide. So far , so good as the case may be.
Tatas have launched the world’s most cheapest cars in the form of Nano. No doubt, it is at affordable price which is very much within the shoe-string budget of middle-class people within the country. So, what? Nano will give away all the opportunities even to the lower middle class families to go for four-wheeler cars at will. Ratan Tata went out of its way when he said that he was motivated to make this car ( People’s Car!) affordable to the people seeing a family ride a scooter on a rainy day! So, corporate banias think about the people!
But they do not care to see the people drenching to the bone without umbrellas! These same people manage to ride buses huddled together like cattles. These are the two sides of reality of truth. So, many more people will have the luxury to flaunt their cars on the roads.
But what is going to happen if more and more cars start plying? Will it do more good than harm? It will do good only to the multinational and trans-national corporate world to breed more money exchanging hands many times more between themselves. It is expansion of economy worldwide in recent times that has swayed the wind on their long coast to cash in on the slightest opprtunity to play havoc with the human instinctives of greed and lust. And they very well know on which side the bread is buttered or on which direction the wind blows.
Their philanthropic gestures are their rank hypocracies. It is an open question that we have not enough reserve of fuel for any number of cars. One more thing of most concern is decreasingly availability of space of land: a comfortable 30.9 square kms. land is still available per 1000 population in America, 7.4 sq. kms. in China and in India it is precariously only 2.6 sq. kms. Scarcity of space of land has forced most of the people to live in one or two rooms with more members. So-called developmental projects has encroached thousands acres of land. If we come to think that many more privileged people will keep personal cars, parking spaces for them will also cough up a large chunk of land.
Then what is going to happen? it is nobody’s guess. And then consumption of petroleum oil will be upwards by leaps and bounds. Consequent upon this, oil price will gradully touch the roof which will result in exorbitant price hike and the poor will be more poorer. On the other hand, who will take into account the environmental consequnces. The threat of global warming and hole in the ozone layer are looming large and will be assuming alarming proportions. Who will bear the brunt of it? Addressing Confederation of Indian Industry, Nobel Laureate R K Pachauri cautioned that the small car will be a real threat to the environment. He said, “With the coming in of Rs. 1lac car, I am having nightmares., I don’t know what will happen then.”
So, the vices of car culture is going to infect the common middle class and most likely to contagious among them. And this is a modern disease of the privileged section of the people who are more and more becoming averse to manual labour but still lapping the milk and honey of the country. They do not care for the others except for themselves. They are here and there mouthful about environmental degredation and depletion of natural resources but in actuality they are the terminator.
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