Never Mind the Bullocks Read Online Free PDF

in on the matter: ‘This car promises to be an environmental disaster of substantial proportions,’ proclaimed Daniel Esty, professor of environmental law at Yale, just after the Nano’s release. 6 Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Panel for Climate Change and director-general of the Energy Resource Institute, made his position clear by stating he was ‘having nightmares’ about the car, 7 an attitude that was echoed by environmental activist Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment, who asked the stinging question: ‘Cars cost us the earth. Can we afford it?’ 8 In an article in her environment fortnightly,
Down to Earth
, she launched an attack on government subsidies for the auto industry that completely disregarded the public transport sector. ‘As the Nano rolls out, think about how we subsidize the car and tax the bus,’ she said, illustrating her point by reminding her readers that in many Indian states, buses paid twelve times the tax of cars. 9
    So, despite the fact that there were masses of people desperate to get their hands on a Nano, there was also a large number of Indians for whom the car didn’t stand as a liberator of the low-income belt, but rather as a giant pain in the ass that would add more traffic to the already over-congested roads.
    Naresh Fernandes was one of these people. It was becoming clear to me that he was not, like me, a driving enthusiast. He was a public transport kind of guy, and as far as he was concerned, an army of shiny new Nanos flooding the market and seducing the country’s emerging new middle class could only spell congestion doom.
    I asked Naresh how he got around the city and he replied by train – like the 6.3 million other Mumbaikars who choose to commute via the suburban rail network every day to avoid the traffic clogging the city’s arteries. It might be an environmentally friendly, socially responsible alternative, but Mumbai’s trains were also straining under the weight of their passengers. A staggering 3,700 people die on their way to work in the city each year 10 – by being pushed out of overcrowded carriages, electrocuted by hanging cables when sitting on the roof or crossing the tracks and getting flattened by an oncoming locomotive. Naresh argued that rather than piling its roads up with more vehicles, India needed first to resolve the existing issues with its public transport system.
    â€˜The situation we now have in India is a lot like what happened in pre-war America, when the motor lobby effectively blocked all prospects of a public transportation network,’ Naresh explained. I was nodding like a plastic St Bernard. He continued, making the popular comparison of the Nano to the Ford Model T, America’s own ‘people’s car’, a century earlier. It was a historical moment that not only initiated the modern concept of the production line but also marked the genesis of the United States as a nation of cars and not trains. The resulting impact on society, urban planning and the environment, not to mention a foreign policy driven in large part by the politics of oil, has been immense. Could India go the same way? Was the country really at such a significant crossroads? Surely the railway system in India – admittedly outdated andflawed in many aspects – was extensive and functional in a way that it had never been in the US? And should we expect a private company like Tata to care about issues of public transport? Was it not doing India a favour by furnishing its people with an alternative to asphyxiation by overcrowded train carriages, high-octane roof surfing and a gruesome flattening on the railway tracks?
    I began to spin with the symbolic consequences of the task I was about to undertake. I was in over my head and probably should have taken advantage of a break in the conversation to make my excuses and leave. I felt like a bumbling Englisher, a parachute