The Release of the Tata Nano

The concept of “automobility” originating from the Greek term “auto” for self puts emphasis on the self-determined, individualistic mode of transportation characteristic to modern society. This concept is increasingly spreading among the world, entering on fast track into the upcoming newly industrialized countries. The projections for economically booming countries like China and India reveal a two-digit percentage growth of car sales for the upcoming decades, assuming that China is likely to outrun the United States and become the largest automotive market worldwide by approximately 2020. The individual ownership of cars, especially in countries which can only partially provide convenient public transport, has become a symbol for personal freedom, status and economic success. In this context the release of the Tata Nano at the Auto Expo in Delhi/India on the 9th of January 2008 resulted in an international and national uproar and conflicting responses. The Nano, with its price of around Rs 1 Lakh (~1800Euro), the cheapest car worldwide, brought about a great enthusiasm about the Indian car market but at the same time caused outcries of environmentalists arguing that with its launch the emission would dramatically increase and the already overloaded streets in urban India would be even more congested and polluted. With regard to the launch of the Nano, Anumita Roychowdhury, working as Associate Director, Research and Advocacy at the Centre for Science and Environment, a long term partner organization to the Heinrich Böll Foundation, comments on the Nano and the current transport situation in India’s cities from an environmentalist point of view.

1. How do you as an environmentalist appraise the drastic rise in car ownership in India over the last years?

Let us position this debate very carefully. How do you understand the threat of motorisation in a country where car ownership is still less than one car per 100 people as opposed to more than 50 cars per 100 people as in the industrialized cities? As in other parts of the world, cars are driving growth and aspirations in India as well. There are no surprises there. So what are we worried about? We are worried about the speed of the change. Just look at the exploding numbers – it took as many as 30 years for us to reach the first million mark for personal vehicles in 1971. After that another 20 years to add two more million. Then in 10 years (1981-91) we have added 14 million; another 10 years (1991-2001) 28 million. But in this decade just in four years (2001 to 2004) we have added 16 million! In a city like Delhi we have now begun to add more than 300,000 vehicles a year and nearly 1000 vehicles a day. This will grow manifold in coming years. Millions more cars will be added – small as well as big, and many of them driven on toxic diesel – jostling for that limited space on our limited roads. This means air quality will only get worse, energy use will go up, and instead of moving ahead, people will actually grind to a stop due to congestion. But we still have the time to act and prevent the future explosion. The World Bank’s forecast shows that developing countries may exceed the motor vehicle fleet of high income countries only after 2050. This means the emerging economies of Asia like India still have an enormous opportunity to avoid car centric growth and avoid huge amount of pollution for the world. The reason why we are debating Nano with so much of concern today is because we still have the time, the chance and the alternative to plan mobility systems and our technology roadmap differently. Despite the increase in car ownership we can restrain car usage, and ensure these cars are clean and efficient. We already have a huge strength in the usage of public transport and in the tradition of walking and cycling that if protected and improved can help us to take an alternative route and avoid huge emissions and oil guzzling just not for us but for the world as well. We can avoid the energy and pollution intensive pathways of the West.

2. The new Tata Nano recently introduced at the Auto Expo is promoted to be the new “Volkswagen”, a people’s car marking a turning point in enabling not only the upper class of India to possess a car but also a wide range of middle class families. How do you assess the impact of the release of the new four-wheeler on India’s streets?

The low cost car segment like the Nano is a new growth area as is also reflected in the global trend. PricewaterhouseCoopers expects India and China to lead with 11 per cent and 34 per cent of the global output of low cost cars by 2014. In India, entry level small cars, that are priced cheap, and now in the grip of a price war, account for two-thirds of car sales. Nano is at the bottom of the pyramid. Frugal engineering, weak regulations, fiscal largess to the car companies, even for their production facilities, can make car prices very cheap. When car prices drop in a price sensitive market of India, it is expected to net in a completely new class of buyers. With improved affordability more people are expected to buy cars. Already market surveys have shown that there is already an enormous potential demand for cars just not in big cities of India but also in small cities, suburbs and villages of India. But also understand the contrasting trends in Indian market. While low cost cars are expected to expand the car ownership at the base of the market pyramid, there is also a steady shift towards bigger and more powerful cars and SUVs in the market. This means both ends of the market pyramid are stretched both ways. Where is the physical and ecological space to drive cars in our cities? Look at Delhi – this capital city of India is most privileged to have more than 20 per cent of its land area dedicated to roads; total road length has increased by about 20 per cent since 1996. And yet, with just a quarter of its population owning cars, the city is gridlocked. Traffic speed and road availability per vehicle in Delhi, as is the case in Mumbai and Bangalore, has actually dropped over time, despite road widening and flyovers. The story is repeated across the big and small cities of India. More roads are not the answer. As we have seen around the world the more roads we build the more traffic is induced. This is the mobility crisis. Increasingly, larger share of daily travel trips are being made in personal vehicles that hog more road space, pollute more on a per passenger basis. These are marginalising buses and pedestrians. Personal vehicles use up more than 75 per cent of our road space but meet only 20 per cent of the city’s commuting needs. But buses that use less than 5 per cent of the road space, meet more than 60 per cent of the travel demand. Across the country, personal vehicles have completely marginalised the buses that comprise a mere 1.1 per cent of the vehicle fleet today. Cars can come cheap. But the hidden costs of using them are enormous. Car owners do not pay adequately for the disproportionately high usage of road space or for parking. If parking charges are adjusted to reflect the costsof providing parking in cities, the rates could be 4 to 5 times higher than the current parking rates. Congestion costs can be as high as Rs 3,000-4,000 crore (about $ 769 million to 1016 million) per year. A recent ASSOCHAM survey finds that on average, people lose 2.5 hours each day, commuting. Fuel lost while idling in traffic jams are not accounted for. But the public policies are too weak to make car pay the full cost of owning and using them. Cheap motorisation becomes so easy because we do not fully recover the cost of owning and using a car.

3. Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, argues that the Nano should and will replace the higher emitting two-wheeler on India’s streets. How do you rate this prediction?

I think it is misleading to make these direct comparisons. If such was the case the used car market where second hand cars can be obtained at a price even lower than Nano would have decimated the two-wheeler market by now. For a two wheeler buyer it is just not the upfront capital cost that matters but also the operative costs during the lifetime of the vehicles. The operational costs for cars can be five to seven times higher than two wheelers. But there can be other implications if two-wheelers are increasingly replaced by cars. No vehicle anywhere so far has been able to achieve the fuel efficiency levels as that of a two wheeler. If the best cars give 25 km/litre, a two wheeler in India gives as much as 60 to 70 km/litre. By the same corollary therefore, the heat trapping gases like emissions from Indian two wheelers can be as low 45 g/km whereas the best hybrid car in the world has just achieved 104 g/km. But as far as local air pollution is concerned two-wheelers can emit as much as petrol cars but certainly not as much as diesel cars. So if emissions standards and safety aspects of two-wheelers can be addressed adequately, there can be significant benefits. But at the end of the day we are not promoting personal vehicles.

4. Is it the Nano’s release which will supposedly cause an ecological disaster as it is projected by many environmental groups or what are the actual factors responsible for the rising transport related emissions in India?

Let us understand this point more clearly. Rising pollution levels in our cities cannot be blamed only on Nano but on rising number of all cars – small, big, cheap and expensive. Car numbers are exploding at a time when air pollution data shows that more than half of our cities are reeling under pollution levels that are officially classified as critical. While the levels of tiny particles that go very deep into our lungs are very high in most of our cities, nitrogen dioxide levels that also aid in the formation of yet another very harmful gas ozone has also begun to rise as in Delhi.Remember direct exposure to traffic fumes is amongst the deadliest of the health threats. Our vehicles pollute so much because we are way down in the technology ladder due to the lag in the emissions standards we follow. Currently, India which follows European emissions standards are 10 years behind Europe and only 11 cities are 5 years behind Europe. At the same time the quality of fuel that we use is also very poor and can block entry of more advanced emissions control technologies that are very sulphur sensitive. The sulphur content of diesel in India is in the range of 350 ppm to 500 pm as opposed to only 10 ppm in Europe. Another reason behind the growing toxicity of air is the rising number of diesel cars especially when diesel related pollutants, particulates and NOx, are so high in our cities. Diesel cars that were only 4 per cent of the new car sales in the late nineties have increased to 30 per cent now and are expected to be 50 per cent by 2010. This trend can get further aggravated by the coming of the super cheap diesel Nano and more such super cheap diesel cars. Just imagine the deadly combination of cheap cars and cheap fuel. Diesel fuel prices in India are 40 per cent lower than gasoline prices. Unfortunately, European standards are also very flawed as these legally allow diesel cars to emit several times more particulates and NOx compared to gasoline cars. All key international health and regulatory agencies including WHO have indicted diesel particulates as toxic and carcinogens. Even Indian emissions data shows that Euro III diesel cars emit seven times more particulates, three times nitrogen oxides, and more than seven times air toxics compared to gasoline cars. It virtually amounts to the fact that adding one diesel car to the fleet is equal to adding seven gasoline cars. Public health impact of this trend can be very severe especially in our cities where studies have shown that one death takes place every hour due to air pollution related diseases.It also gives us no comfort to think that diesel cars are more fuel efficient than gasoline cars and emit comparatively less emissions. Even thoughdiesel cars may be 15 to 20 per cent more fuel efficient per vehicle kilometer on a litre to litre comparison the cheap diesel fuel also incites more driving and therefore the gains per kilometer are lost. This results in a rising Co2. emission as diesel’s carbon content is higher than gasoline. Moreover, the new science is also showing that even the black carbon from diesel vehicles have strong warming potential. We must avoid the European trend towards small diesel cars that have actually blocked the development of fuel neutral emissions standards in Europe today. Simultaneous and substantial lowering of particulates, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxides together from diesel cars presents a serious engineering challenge. Heavy-duty traffic – buses and trucks, and especially transit traffic – are the other sources of very harmful transport related emissions in our cities. Heavy-duty technologies have lagged behind in India largely because of lack of uniform standards across the country. Trucks and buses that largely ply on highways therefore tend to get registered in areas with lax emissions standards. Clearly, we need urgent policy intervention to introduce uniform and very stringent emission standards across the country to enable advanced, efficient and clean technologies without getting caught in a tradeoff.

5. What solutions for assuring sustainable mobility in urban and rural areas do you as CSE promote for India?

It is very clear that explosion in car numbers can gridlock our cities; snuff life out of cities; and, make our future more energy insecure and our climate warmer. This demands stringent and preventive strategies. We will have to leapfrog our vehicle technologies and fuel quality to meetclean emissions targets, and, radically change the mobility paradigm in our cities. There is no either/or about this. So the agenda for policy action is very clear.

i) We need aggressive technology roadmap: The new investments in the vehicle sector will have to be linked with the most stringent emissions
    standards so that we can benefit from the global innovations in car technologies and avoid harmful emissions. We also need strong in-use  compliance regulations to ensure that the vehicles continue to remain low emitting during their useful life on the roads and not just when they are made. Policies must create opportunities for advanced clean and efficient technologies to commercialise rapidly and discourage use of dirty diesel.

ii) We urgently need fuel economy regulations to prevent mindless oil guzzling that may get worse with more cars on the roads and shift towards bigger cars. Fuel economy standards will also give us the opportunity to avoid increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

iii) Our cities need mobility, not cars. Cars cannot meet the commuting needs of the urban majority. We need to re-design public policies to promote mobility for all – scale up efficient public transport and implement effective tax policies to restrain car use. We need urgent policy intervention to first protect the current ridership of public transport in our cities. As I have mentioned earlier, even today public transport meets significant share of commuting trips – 60 per cent in Delhi, 80 per cent in Mumbai, 70 per cent in Calcutta among others. Do not let people abandon the bus. It is more difficult to bring people back from cars to buses. Urgent investments are needed to scale up and make qualitative improvement in our public transport. A bus should have the same glamour as the car.

iv). We need policies to restrain usage of personal vehicles: People may buy cars but there should be restraints on their usage. Today our government actually penalizes buses by taxing them higher than cars. In Delhi, a bus is charged roughly 43 times more road taxes than cars. These distortions must go. The fuel taxes, parking charges, road pricing and congestion pricing must reflect the true cost of owning and using a car. But resistance to such proposals is very strong as these directly hit the middle class aspirations. We need strong public awareness regarding pollution and congestion challenges of “automobilisation”.

6. What can the government do to ensure a more sustainable transport system and what policies or actions are urgently to be taken to avoid the total collapse of the urban transport system?

We need composite policy action on air quality, congestion and energy impacts of motorisation.

i. Make air quality standards legally enforceable in our cities. Based on the non-compliance status set air quality targets for cities to be met in a time bound manner. In case of violation central development grants to the state governments should be cut. This will ensure effective improvement in emissions standards and compliance with them, and, push for sustainable mobility plans in the cities.

ii. All cities need public transport plans and a time bound target to increase their usage with measurable modal shift. Some nascent action has begun in India that provides the national framework for the public transport and sustainable mobility. These include National Urban Transport Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewable Mission and the infrastructure plan for Small and Medium Towns. These are expected to lay down the foundation for sustainable mobility in India. But the national policy framework is still not strong enough to support for public transport augmentation plans and stimulate local level funding – both public and private – in public transport. The national framework should be made stronger to enable public transport augmentation and car restraint policies at the city level.

iii. The city action plans on transportation and mobility management are urgently needed. This mandate is so decentralized that it is the ability of the individual city governments that will ultimately decide the progress on this front. City governments have the powers to work with a wide variety of tax and road pricing measures to restrain car usage and promote public transport.

iv. We need a focused plan for the small cities and towns of India as these cities are most vulnerable to cheap small car explosion. These cities still have a strong tradition of walking and cycling. Unfortunately, public policies on public transport are virtually non-existent for these cities. In fact, under the urban infrastructure development scheme for small and medium towns of the central government, urban transport and rolling stock of buses do not even qualify for support. Just because these cities do not have high density travel corridors to justify investment in ‘profitable’ public transport. This essentially means that by default the responsibility of organizing mobility in small cities is left to the people who then graduate to buying personal vehicles.

v. Public transport is also a victim of poor management and weak institutions. The existing state-owned transit agencies that are expected to shoulder the major burden of upgrading and expanding bus transport systems in cities need to urgent reforms to improve their efficiency and performance. Equally challenging will be reorganization of the private bus operators and agencies on corporate or cooperative lines to ensure quality of services. The rapid mass transit systems will require innovative and dedicated management systems and supervision.

vi. The underlying principle of any transportation plan is to improve access to different modes of transportation in the city. Once a combination of mass transport systems are developed, their proper integration is needed to ensure that all modes of transport – mass rapid transit system, buses and intermediate transport, – operate at their optimum capacity and are not underutilized.

vii. Equally important is to have a focussed policy on bicycles and pedestrians. Dedicated corridors for walking, cycling and buses should be the basis of reorganization of the road space in our cities. Even today in cities like Delhi nearly 40 per cent travel needs are met by bicycles in some parts of the city. But this transport is under severe pressure due to hostile traffic conditions on the roads. The message is clear: public policy will have to recognize that car centric growth will neither give clean air nor mobility for all.

The interview was conducted by Friederike Pietsch on the 29th of January 2008.