I
am now getting fed to the gills over the collective breast beating in the media
about the slump in automobile sales. There’s so much stupidity, ignorance, bad
faith, sheer cussedness and hidden agenda sloshing around in the muck that it
is enough to make any sane man want to throw up.
First,
they are terribly worried that the slump in auto sales – which now apparently
makes up half the organized manufacturing sector – is a sign of deep rooted
malaise in the economy as a whole. The GDP growth rate is slowing down, and
that is apparently an unquestionably BAD THING. Who says so, and why should an
economy keep growing very fast endlessly? It’s not as if we are not growing at
all; in fact, even the worst doomsayers are admitting that we are still growing
at almost 5% per year, which is much faster than we managed for the four and
half decades before 1991, and much faster than all the richest economies are managing
to do; as the GDP keeps growing bigger, it becomes increasingly harder to
maintain the same growth rate year on year, as anyone with basic common sense
and primary school math ought to understand (5% of 10,000 is a much bigger
figure to attain than 5% of 100!) – obviously journalists don’t fall into that
category; that a single sector slowdown
could so badly affect the overall growth rate should be a matter of worry and
shame (why have all other sectors taken together, including that darling of the
pinhead millennial generation, smartphones, failed to shoulder a bigger part of
the burden?), and why do we still not understand that limitless high growth in
a finite world might actually be a deadly disease (in the human body it is
called cancer)?
Who
are the people who are predicting doomsday – mindless journalists apart? One
class is those who are unthinking votaries of the endless growth ideal: I have
already mentioned them, and I’ll come back to them shortly. Another is those
who pretend that their hearts are bleeding over job losses, though the much
more likely fact is that they stand to lose vast fortunes because they hold
huge chunks of shares in auto companies (the billionaire quoted in The Telegraph report could well be a
case in point): it makes me sick to see tycoons shedding crocodile tears over
the loss of some of the most miserable jobs in the country (recall the
complaints of the workers who went on strike at a Maruti-Suzuki plant a few
years ago). The third is those who were thrilled to bits that we had grown a
very large auto manufacturing industry, imagining in their blissful ignorance
that that would mean being recognised by the world as a technologically ‘advanced’
country, though the fact is that all the technology we use in our factories,
from engines to windscreen wipers, is borrowed and copied from foreign sources,
German or Japanese, Korean or French: what we do is what they disdainfully
refer to as ‘screwdriver technology’, merely putting together according to
their instructions what they have imagined, designed, tested and put on the
roads. The fourth would be those who will happily wield any stick to beat the
Modi government with: it’s all that wretched man’s fault, and he’s going to
ruin us all! I don’t carry a brief for him, and I don’t think very highly of
the way he is running the country, but this is reaching absurd proportions.
They make believe that all our previous PMs were paragons of virtue as well as
competence, and that is very, very far from the truth! Suppose there had been twitter
in the era of Deve Gowda or Charan Singh?
Why
do we need to keep on producing endless millions of cars and two wheelers every
year? When shall we start giving a thought to how they are clogging up every
street and alley, how they have made traffic jams an insufferable permanent
feature of life in every city, how they are killing and maiming hundreds of
thousands every year, how much they are polluting the air, how they have caused
our oil import bill to balloon, how dependence on them instead of on foot and
bicycles and the like is leading to an obesity epidemic, and how most cars,
countless surveys show, stand around idly on roads or in garages or parking
lots for most of the time?
I
should argue that it is a good thing that the demand for private motor vehicles
of all sorts is slowing down. I hope it is a permanent phenomenon. The slowdown
might not be directly a result of an overall economic slump at all, but due to
the fact that demand has reached a saturation point. As it is, we know that
demand has been artificially pumped by criminally lax traffic control laws and
too-easy credit, quietly encouraged by governments hungry for tax revenue,
coupled with the fact that from Audis to Bajaj Pulsars, cars and bikes have
been status symbols cutting across all social divisions for a long time. So
every fly-by-night businessman wants to flaunt a fancy limousine as much as
every slum-dwelling unemployed young son of a rickshawallah wants to zoom
around on his own two wheeler, with all the nasty consequences listed above.
Who will gain from that continuing endlessly? And perhaps the steam is running
out of that artificially-inflated demand balloon – perhaps the bad loans are
now piling up too fast for the banks to keep dangling the carrot of cheap loans
any more? And perhaps there are too many fancy cars and bikes on the roads already
for them to be aspirational any longer? As the banker Uday Kotak has wisely
counselled the auto industry, they should start thinking seriously of other
kinds of business, because cars are no longer an aspiration in this country: even
his own son, a billionaire’s heir, apparently finds it much more sensible to
depend on Uber and the like.
I
have long cried myself hoarse saying that so far as transportation – especially
road transportation – is concerned, a poor, congested, oil scarce, socially
undisciplined country like ours should have followed the European or Japanese
model of development, and most certainly not the grossly wasteful American one.
Alas, we chose to do just the reverse, and we are now reaping the bitter
harvest. But maybe we are beginning to learn some lessons at last. All future developments
in India in this sphere should be aimed singlemindedly at improving public
transport all round (everything from a/c buses to metro rail to Uber/Ola to
e-rickshaws), and discouraging private vehicles so strenuously that they
gradually become extinct. The overall social benefits would be so huge as to be
nearly incalculable.
As
for those who think that a slowing GDP-growth rate is the worst of all
imaginable evils, I can only click my tongue with pity and contempt, and tell
them to go and read books like J.K. Galbraith’s The
Affluent Society or Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. For a long time, we have needed redistribution much more than endless
growth: those who will not listen simply don’t deserve to be reasoned with.
