Still more cars and bikes?

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.