Auto Industry Boom!!! - Doom for India?

21st March 2010 (Happy bday Dad!!!),

2.54 PM

Mumbai,

Hi There,

This has been a very very hectic week for me!!! Have been very busy taking rest, doing nothin and fooling around wid my wifey.. :) and as you all know if you are doing nothing, there's nothing specific that you think and hence difficult to pen it down..LOL..

Anyways.. Now that I've been going to the university regularly for the past 3 days, i was hopeful of getting a topic for my post. And voilaaa!!! it struck me right in the middle of a major traffic jamm in Kurla. We as a country are very happy that the auto industry is booming, growing at the rate of noughts. The last time i checked most of the major players had posted a record quarterly sales and were growing at more than 50% year on year. Great news isn't it?? Also the government is willing to put more money in the hands of the common man and facilitate options for him to buy more cars. Tata motors will churn out around 300,000 nanos alone from thier Gujarat plant alone, leave aside the other products in its portfolio. Maruti Suzuki, the market leader had sold 95694 vehicles in January and 96650 in February. That's really great news for the shareholders. Ford coming up with its dynamic small car Figo, Nissan coming up with Micra, GM with the spunky Beat... The list is endless. In another piece of news, Volkswagen wants to takeover Toyota as the biggest car manufacturer by 2018, and to do that, it has to put over 10 million cars on the road.

What's the message that we all get from this? The message is that we are gonna be surrounded by cars and trucks by the end of next decade!! Is our infrastructure ready to handle this tsunami? MMRDA and the government takes more than 3 years to complete a simple flyover. It took us eternity to complete the sea-link. Where are all the cars gonna travel? In Mumbai a trip of 25 kms by car takes almost 90 mins. Every road is dug up with no one having a clue about what's the work being done. Good roads are dug up and bad roads are left to deteriorate further. Can you imagine with this kind of administration what are we heading to? With no space to drive and no space to park, this auto boom monster will be the second biggest problem that we are gonna face after our population explosion.

Shouldnt the Govt plan the infrastructure first before approving the manufacturing plants of these auto companies? Instead of promoting car loans at higly reduced interest rates, cant the public transport system be spruced up? And finally if a guy like me can think of these questions at the back of my mind while commuting through the city, cant the people in power think and do something about it?

The problem seems complicated.. But the answer lies in two simple words, "COMMON SENSE"........ which is not so common these days..:)

Think bout it people, or we wont even be able to cross the road in times to come.

Signing off..

AG