India, Enlightened

(Page 4 of 5)

THE MAN FROM SIAM

Back in Delhi, I stopped at a newsstand and picked up a copy of Auto India. There was nothing in there about the Nano: Tata Motors was keeping its new baby under wraps for another couple of weeks.

Otherwise, Auto India looked much like any other car mag: reviews of the new E-Class Mercedes; glossy gatefold ads that said things like Smooth. Suave. Sure. The Über-Cool Is Here. So when I went to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) to meet its director, Dilip Chenoy, I pretty much knew what to expect: lots of guy talk about sound systems and leather upholstery and zero to 60 in 5.9 seconds.

Instead, Chenoy started talking about milk.

"My favorite image in India is the milkman," he said. "He used to walk to your door with four bottles. Then he developed a carrier, so he brought eight. Then he came on a bicycle with two big drums. Then he progressed to a motorbike, with four drums, and then a small pickup truck with even more. From there to a larger truck, and then the mother dairy bought a big refrigerated truck. In the process India went from being the 15th-largest producer of milk in the world to being the largest. And without that shift in transportation you would not have been able to realize the dream."

He intended this as a parable, obviously, and it served as the prelude to an impassioned speech about India's development goals and the social benefits of greater mobility, ticking off the environmental pros and cons of various forms of private and public transportation.

"We have more than a billion people but fewer than a hundred million motor vehicles on the road," he began. "So our challenge is to figure out the most economically viable way of providing mobility, so that people can get to school, find employment in rural areas, become entrepreneurs. And it has to be sustainable in terms of emissions. That's what we're trying to do here, and the private car is only part of it."

Even though car ownership might increase, he wanted to put the numbers in context. He said, "There are fewer cars in India than Detroit produces -- or used to produce -- in a year. So the scale is totally different. And the primary use of a car here is for the service economy. As you will have seen, the cars here are loaded with stuff."

I asked why there was such a wide variation among Indian cities in "mode share" -- the percentage of travelers using different kinds of transportation. I picked three cities, more or less at random, from a chart I'd been given by Partha Mukhopadhyay, a transportation expert at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi. All three were about the same size, close to two and a half million people. In Kanpur, 16 percent of passengers travel by car. In Jaipur, the figure is 8 percent. In Nagpur, it's 3 percent. It depends to a large extent on the availability of public transportation, Chenoy explained, and that sector has historically been neglected in India. The term is also too narrowly defined, he added. "There's this mind-set that public transportation equals a 42-seater bus. But it may also be a car, or a small van, or an SUV."

Presumably he'd seen me wince at the mention of SUVs. Too polite to sneer at my American preconceptions, he explained patiently that SUVs in India are generally not sold to highway hogs and soccer moms; three-quarters of them are sold in rural areas, where they may be used to haul goods, to take village kids to school, or as a "para-transit" option to compensate for the absence of buses. And Indian SUVs, made by companies like Tata and Mahindra, are subject to increasingly stringent fuel efficiency and emissions standards. The SUV as instrument of social progress and friend of the environment: an arresting notion.

"A lot of well-meaning people talk about gas-guzzlers and also about big luxury cars," he continued, warming to his theme of cultural relativism. "But let's not miss the wood for the trees. We're only talking about 3,000 luxury cars a year." And those high-end vehicles, while they may be emblematic of India's new culture of conspicuous consumption, are very important from an environmental perspective, he said. They're the test-bed for all the technological innovations -- things like common-rail diesel engines, homogeneous gas compression, variable valve timing, lightweight alloys and composites -- that will later find their way into the mass market to increase efficiency and lower emissions.

"And all of the major Indian manufacturers are thinking that way?" I asked.

"Yes, yes!" he exclaimed, as if there were any other way to think.

THE ÜBER-COOL

The following day it took more than an hour to get to the spanking-new Tata Motors showroom in Okhla Phase II, just a mile or two from the train station where I'd begun my journey. The first part of the ride was deceptive, since it sped us along the broad, grassy avenues and past the heroically scaled government buildings that the British architect Edwin Lutyens laid out in the early twentieth century, when Delhi took over from Calcutta as the capital of the raj. After that, though, it was a tedious stop -- start crawl through the morning traffic, with constant diversions around "Work in Progress" signs that denoted new highway overpasses or extensions to the Delhi Metro.

As we inched forward along the ring road, countless two-wheelers -- motorbikes and scooters -- slalomed in and out of the traffic. Some carried four people: dad in front, older kid in the middle, mom riding sidesaddle with an infant on her lap, and only dad wearing a helmet.

Getting around Delhi is a tricky business; in the language of urban planning it's a "poly-nodal" city. It isn't like Mumbai, for example, which is built on a narrow north-south axis and where people have a long tradition of traveling from A to B by train. Delhi planners must anticipate the need for complicated, zigzag journeys. If they don't, people will shun public transportation.

Which is not to say that the buses aren't overcrowded; there just aren't enough of them. All of them carry hand-painted slogans, which, given the choking smog, appear to have been written by someone with a sense of humor. Some read "World's Largest Eco-Friendly CNG Bus Service." The message on others comes in a number of variant spellings: "Propeld by Clean Fuel," or "Prepalled by Clean Full." In 1998, following a series of Supreme Court rulings on air pollution, the city of Delhi ordered the conversion of all commercial passenger vehicles -- buses, taxis, and autorickshaws -- to compressed natural gas. But that raised a couple of big questions, Mukhopadhyay had said. Was it wise to mandate a particular fuel, rather than to increase overall fuel efficiency? And could the plan be replicated in other cities, since that would mean a massive increase in India's capacity to produce and distribute natural gas? At best, he said, given the overall increase in congestion, Delhi had bought itself a short reprieve from even more polluted air.

The Metro, which I'd ridden the previous evening, was supposed to offer another remedy. It is squeaky clean, and the trains are punctual. There are notices about the specially designed features for "differently abled passengers." The first phase of the system, which opened in 2000, was finished on time -- a distinct rarity for India, and indeed for any megaproject anywhere. Now the lines are being extended to the airport and to the satellite city of Gurgaon, a center of India's outsourcing boom. Yet the Metro, too, has its share of critics: much of the cost was borne by massive public subsidies; ridership predictions were over-optimistic; and the lines didn't go where they were needed, since they had been planned in the 1970s, when Delhi had just a fraction of its present population of 14 million.

So the number of private vehicles just keeps on rising. At the last count, in March 2007, there were almost 1.6 million cars in the city, Mukhopadhyay had told me, more than in India's other two megacities -- Mumbai and Kolkata -- combined. And there are twice that number of two-wheelers. More than 1,000 new vehicles hit the roads every day.

We arrived at the Tata showroom at last, and while I waited for the regional manager to get there I made small talk with a couple of the salesmen. They spoke about Ratan Tata, the head of the company, with something approaching reverence, as if he were not only a corporate titan but a personal guru, even a saint. It was those overloaded two-wheelers, one of the salesmen said, that had inspired Mr. Tata to come up with the idea of the Nano. He wanted something for families that was safe, affordable, and environmentally friendly.

One side of the showroom was given over to Tata, the other to Fiat; the two companies have a joint marketing arrangement. But I couldn't see any car that looked small enough to be a Nano. "No," the salesman said, "they haven't let anyone see it yet, not even us." He giggled with anticipation, like a kid waiting for Santa Claus.

His boss, Vishwas Kapoor, arrived at last, full of apologies for being late. "Stuck in traffic," he said, unnecessarily.

He walked me around. Many of the models on display were variants of the Indica, the car I'd seen at Mahavir Singh's house in Rajasthan. Nearby were several larger Tata cars and SUVs.

"What kind of mileage do all these vehicles get?" I asked, wondering how they would compare to the aptly named Nano, which looks a bit like a four-door version of the tiny, slope-fronted Smart car that is so popular in Europe.

The answer amazed me. The various models of Indica get anything from 35 to 50 miles per gallon. Even the 10-seat diesel Sumo Victa, the biggest of the SUVs, boasts more than 32 mpg on the highway. Impressive numbers by U.S. standards.

Around eleven o'clock the first walk-in customer of the day arrived, a smartly dressed Sikh in a red turban. He introduced himself as Manjeet Singh, a travel agent in the suburban neighborhood of Vasant Vihar. He already owned a small fleet of eight Indicas, which the company used for commercial purposes. He was here today to buy number nine.

I asked him the same question I'd asked the other Mr. Singh, back in the village of Badgujran: "Would you consider a Nano?"

"Not for myself," he said, "but a lot of my friends are thinking about it. It could be as a second car, or maybe a gift for their wife or their 18-year-old who has just learned to drive. And the two-wheelers are also interested, of course."

That was really the crux of the matter, Mukhopadhay had said. It all depended on how the Nano was marketed. The idea of millions of two-wheelers being replaced by four-wheelers appalled him, no matter how high the mpg. "But in the unlikely event the Nano becomes a lifestyle statement, switching people away from larger cars, it could be a great success," he said. "It will be a test of our social imagination about what car ownership means."

The Nano will appeal to both market segments, said the man from Tata, although no one really knows what to expect. The numbers will be small at first, just a few thousand cars a month; the main production facility, in the state of Gujarat, isn't even on line yet. As if to assuage my anxiety at the prospect of all those two-wheeler owners upgrading, he pointed at the Fiat poster on the wall. It showed a car swerving around a scenic bend, as cars always do in the ads. It was the latest incarnation of the humble Fiat 500, introduced in the 1950s as the Italian equivalent of Germany's VW Beetle or France's tin-can Citroën 2CV.

"How much does one of those cost in India?" I asked.

"With 100 percent import duty, about 14 or 15 lakhs," Kapoor said.

"Thirty thousand dollars? Who's going to pay that?"

"Oh, you'd be surprised. It's very popular. We get famous movie actors, models, fashion photographers in here all the time to buy it. In Europe it may be basic, but here it's a lifestyle product."

In India, he was suggesting, small can be über-cool.

Continued...