Journey from 800 to 1,00,000.

Today is the proud day of Indian transportation history, 14 Dec. On 14^th Dec 1983 Smt. Indira Gandhi handed over the keys of the FIRST Maruti 800 to Shri Harpal Singh at the spanking new Maruti Udyog plant in Gurgaon. That little white car set a million hearts on fire. The Indian roads became cheerful, colourful and full of energy. The joy of motoring was finally here!

The journey of this common man* car began with many dreams, ideas, and thoughts. As far as I knew the idea of making a car was of Mr. Sanjay Gandhi. He had a team of handful engineers with whom he did his design processes and few prototyping. One can be seen below with Mr. Sanjay Gandhi and an engineer of his team.

Now after two and half decades of that pride moment Mr. Ratan Tata has launched his Tata Nano just worth Rs. One lakh. He says it was his dream to come up with such an affordable car. He really did his best to execute his dream into reality by providing such a low cost car to the Indian market, which was almost an impossible task for the western manufacturers. Few people even called it an innovation on its own. I must say a great example of engineering with a very Indian thought of low cost.

But do we really require it? The world is recognizing us as an economically most influential country. I know the ground reality quite look different but though it is not. We are moving and progressing with the same democratically corrupted system which is incredible. I remember a quote by our Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh in an international visit where he said he agrees we are not as fast as Chinese but surely we can’t adopt their value system for the sake of growth (Democracy Vs Communism). I really felt very proud of that statement, well said.

So I see this as we have a grown and huge market with a poor infrastructure system which makes us slow. I perceive we don’t have shortage of capital but an infrastructure surely. We as a growing economy aren’t and shouldn’t be asking for cost effective products rather we demand for quality life. In a growing economy our basic needs are taken for granted so that we can build for quality life and that’s what differentiate a developing economy from under developed economy. So I don’t agree to a concept of one lakh rupees car because it’s not a matter of affordance but of a poor infrastructure. We are already facing many other problems like space congestion, traffic, teenage driving, fuel prices etc. And introducing such a product will definitely made the infrastructure weaker while it should have been vice versa. Just as a thought, I will rather stand for a car costing much higher (may be 8 to 10 lakh+) so that we can promote public transport and can lessen the unnecessary ownerships of four wheelers in a family. This is a waste of resources and an unnecessary complexity to our system.

Would like to share a poster designed by me for the topic, be responsible to your environment. The third winning entry in India Design Festival.