India’s automobile industry appears to be slowdown-proof. Car manufacturers’ domestic sales grew over 25 per cent in 2009-10 and are expected to be over 30 per cent in 2010-11. That means more than 3 million cars have been added in two years to an urban road network that has scarcely expanded. To be sure, it’s not the Nano that has contributed to this acceleration — Tata Motors is struggling with the opposite problem of low sales. India’s shining incomes and glittering loan schemes are accelerating automobile sales every month as Indians look to acquire status and insulate themselves from poor public transport facilities.
Ergo: car manufacturers cannot be held responsible for growing road traffic and its associated problems. As Tata’s reply suggested, they’re in the business of producing and assembling increasingly world class automobiles for upwardly mobile Indians (safer ones, too, with seat belts and air bags). Benchmarked against the tank-like utility of the Ambassador and the East European stolidity of the Premier Padmini, the two long-running monopolists of yesteryear, it has to be admitted that they’re getting better and better at doing so.
All the same, it is also possible to argue that the exponential growth in automobile sales is a key contributor to the fact that India now has the world’s highest reported road traffic accident rate, according to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) latest Global Status Report on Road Safety. And on this count, India’s convergence with world class standards diverges. Where trends in traffic deaths in the developed West are showing a decline, India’s are now crossing the 120,000 deaths per year mark. The bulk of these traffic-related deaths are on account of speeding (despite impractically low speed limits within cities and on the highways) and drunken driving.
Traffic-related deaths represent the extreme result of abysmal road discipline. According to the WHO report, India also has a robust record of non-fatal traffic-related injuries (almost 500,000 a year, and these are only the reported numbers), indicating a chronic problem. (The costs of traffic-related deaths and accidents apparently account for as much as 3 per cent of GDP, though the basis of this calculation is not clear.) READ MORE ON PAGE 2 >>
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